Castro's experiment in revolutionary education
For months, reports have circulated in Europe and the U.S. about Cuban "kidnapings": African youths, taken involuntarily from their peasant homes and flown to Fidel Castro's country for ideological indoctrination. Jonas Savimbi, leader of the anti-Marxist, rebel UNITA movement in Angola, has even used the word slavery to describe what is taking place. The stories, which are given some credence by Western observers in Africa, cast a shadow over one of the Cuban President's proudest achievements: the creation of 15 revolutionary schools on the Isle of Youth.
Lying some 60 miles off the southwest coast of Cuba, the lush island—formerly known as the Isle of Pines—is swept by breezes scented by countless pine trees and grapefruit groves. The island has an unsavory past: before Castro's revolution it housed the Presidio, one of the most brutal prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Castro was incarcerated there for 20 months in 1954-55.
Today there are some 11,000 students, aged twelve to 18, from Central America and Africa on the island, along with 19,000 young Cubans, learning the fundamentals of math, physics, chemistry—and Marxist ideology. TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott, who visited the island, found plenty of regimentation, but no readily detectable evidence that the youths are there against their will. There may well be exceptions, but if so, they are effectively subdued by group pressure. Scott's report, after a two-day tour:
"¡Oye!" shouted a Cuban teacher standing beside a battered Soviet bus. "iVenga, venga, venga [Hurry up]!" Emerging silently like guerrillas from behind endless rows of grapefruit trees were 25 Mozambican boys, dressed in well-washed jeans and carrying sharp, long-bladed pruning knives. Striding in an orderly single file onto the bus that would carry them to lunch at their school, the boys burst spontaneously into well-harmonized songs praising African solidarity and the works of their country's President, Samora Machel. "They are always singing," beamed the Cuban teacher. "It's part of their national tradition."
The routine of the schools is almost military in nature. Except when they are working in the fields (usually about three hours a day), the youths are dressed in blue uniforms with red kerchiefs and red berets, the standard garb of Cuba's own "young pioneers." The students are roused at 6 a.m., take breakfast (typically ham, bread and milk) in carefully ordered sittings at the school's mess hall. They are held responsible for the neatness of their dorms, which are crowded with double-decker bunks; each student has shelves by his bed to store books and clothing.
Students at each school are separated into 15 groups, which engage in a weekly competition, judged by the teachers, for neatness, attentiveness in class, and work performance in the fields. The top three groups are awarded flags that they carry proudly aloft as they march out to the fields and back again.