---
title: ¡Venceremos!:Cuba's 1961 literacy campaign, the primer, and the year-end declaration
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/
description: In 1961 Cuba's government taught adults to read from a primer whose first lesson was the Organization of American States, glossed in the book as a tool…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence-dossier collage dominated by a distressed world map with connecting routes, coordinates and highlighted regions.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-map-heavy.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# ¡Venceremos!:Cuba's 1961 literacy campaign, the primer, and the year-end declaration

At a glance

In 1961 Cuba's government taught adults to read from a primer whose first lesson was the Organization of American States, glossed in the book as a tool of "Yankee imperialists…

- **When:** December 22, 1961
- **Actor:** Government of Cuba under Fidel Castro, through the National Literacy Commission and the Ministry of…
- **Target:** Cuban adults recorded as illiterate, especially in the countryside…
- **Source:** Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Government of Cuba under Fidel Castro, through the National Literacy Commission and the Ministry of Education under Armando Hart
- **Target:** Cuban adults recorded as illiterate, especially in the countryside; the young people sent to teach them; listeners of the year-end declaration

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** In 1961 Cuba's government taught adults to read from a primer whose first lesson was the Organization of American States, glossed in the book as a tool of "Yankee imperialists," using brigades named for a killed volunteer teacher, and on 22 December declared the country a "territory free of illiteracy" by dividing the people left untaught by the whole population.

![Diagram: the primer and the teacher manual feed three teaching forces, the student force named for Conrado Benítez, and those forces feed the 22 December rate; a band under the steps marks the counts this page does not settle](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961-diagram.svg)

## What happened

- **29 August 1960.** At the graduation of the first contingent of volunteer teachers, Fidel Castro says the government will "librar la batalla contra el analfabetismo" the next year and "liquidar el analfabetismo" by "movilizando al pueblo" ("fight the battle against illiteracy"; "wipe out illiteracy"; "mobilizing the people"). *Granma*'s later transcription is the text used here.
- **26 September 1960.** At the UN General Assembly, Castro says "Treinta y siete y medio por ciento de nuestra población era analfabeta" ("thirty-seven and a half percent of our population was illiterate") and that within a few months Cuba will be able to say it "no tiene un solo analfabeto" ("does not have a single illiterate"). The 37.5 percent is his figure that day. It is not the 1953 census figure below.

![Fidel Castro in olive fatigues standing among men in suits on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly hall, a photographer at left](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961-castro-un-general-assembly-1960.jpg)

*Fidel Castro at the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 22 September 1960, four days before the speech quoted above. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain (the magazine's photographs were dedicated to the public on donation).*

- **31 December 1960.** At Ciudad Libertad, the old Columbia barracks turned over to the Ministry of Education, Castro names 1961 the "Año de la Educación" ("Year of Education") and sets "la meta de erradicar, totalmente, el analfabetismo en solo un año" ("the goal of totally eradicating illiteracy in only one year"). He says two million primers are being printed, and that if the teachers already at work are not enough, the school year will be cut short and students from the sixth grade up will be sent out from May.
- **5 January 1961.** Cuban official accounts say volunteer teacher Conrado Benítez García, 18, was killed at Las Tinajitas, in the Escambray, by a band led by Osvaldo Ramírez. He had been teaching in the mountains, not yet as a member of the student brigades. Those brigades were named for him afterward. On 23 January, at the graduation of the second contingent of volunteer teachers, Castro announces the killing and says the dead teacher will go on being a teacher.
- **28 January 1961.** On José Martí's birthday, Castro calls students and the public into the campaign. Published accounts treat this as the start of the mass call. The student brigades take Benítez's name, a hymn, and a uniform. They are trained at Varadero before leaving for the countryside. Accounts of the course length do not agree, and this page does not pick one.
- **April 1961.** Schools are closed so students can teach. The Ministry of Education under Armando Hart, through the National Literacy Commission, runs the campaign. Three forces carry it: local "alfabetizadores populares" ("popular alphabetizers"), the student Conrado Benítez brigades, and, later in the year, worker brigades called "Patria o Muerte" ("Homeland or Death"). They live in the houses where they teach. Classes are at night, after work, often by lantern. The Bay of Pigs landing and the Escambray fighting of that year are not this page.
- **The books.** The learner's primer is *¡Venceremos!* ("We shall win"), printed in 1961 by the Imprenta Nacional. Its own front matter, as quoted from the 1961 text, says the title means winning "no sólo en la defensa de nuestra Patria, sino también en la Campaña de Alfabetización" ("not only in the defense of our homeland, but also in the Literacy Campaign"). The first lesson is the letters OEA, the Organization of American States. A study of the primer renders the book's gloss as "an organization joining the countries of the Americas, used by Yankee imperialists to impose their will on Latin American countries." The fifteen lessons are political topics of that year: OEA; INRA, the agrarian-reform institute; the agrarian-reform cooperative; the land; Cuban fishermen; the people's store; a Cuban owning his house; a healthy people in a free Cuba; the tourism institute; the militias; "the Revolution wins all battles"; the people at work; "Cuba is not alone"; the Year of Education; poetry and the alphabet. The teacher manual *Alfabeticemos* ("Let's teach reading and writing") pairs those lessons with 24 orientation themes, including "La Revolución," "Fidel es nuestro líder" ("Fidel is our leader"), "El imperialismo," "Amigos y enemigos" ("Friends and enemies"), and the Declaration of Havana. A study of that manual also finds military instruction in the brigadista course, beside the didactic and psychological parts. This page names the themes. It does not reproduce the lessons as a course.
- **The test.** Cuban accounts of the campaign's own rules describe three tests. At the end of the third, the learner writes a letter to Fidel Castro. The letter stays in the municipal file and is what entitles the learner to the follow-up book. Reading the primer and writing that letter is the campaign's own mark of having become literate.

![Black-and-white portrait of an older man in a white shirt at a school desk, a pencil at his lips, an open handwritten notebook and a cigarette pack in front of him](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961-unesco-adult-learner-marianao-1967.jpg)

*An adult learner at a desk with a notebook and pencil, Marianao, near Havana, 1967: one of the photographs UNESCO's Dominique Roger took at the Centro Especial Jorge Dimitrof, an evening literacy centre with ten classes and 390 adults. It is a later, third-party photograph, not a 1961 field image. UNESCO Archives, via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.*

- **26 November 1961.** Manuel Ascunce Domenech, 16, a Conrado Benítez brigadista, is killed at Limones Cantero with Pedro Lantigua, the campesino in whose house he was teaching. Cuban press and judicial reconstructions say a band under Julio Emilio Carretero killed them, and those reconstructions describe a hanging. A short encyclopedia summary of the rebels' view says they treated Ascunce as a communist agitator and both men as spies. The manner, and that motive claim, are not findings of this page.
- **21 and 22 December 1961.** The National Literacy Commission, meeting on 21 December, adopts a final report. The next day, in the Plaza de la Revolución, Hart reads it. Castro speaks. A flag is raised to the Conrado Benítez hymn, and Cuba is proclaimed "Territorio Libre de Analfabetismo" ("a territory free of illiteracy"). Castro calls it the hour "en que cuatro siglos y medio de ignorancia han sido derrumbados" ("in which four and a half centuries of ignorance have been brought down") and says only a people in revolution could have done it.
- **What the report counts, in the words read that day.** Illiterates located in the year: 979,207 adults. Taught: 707,000. Population, from the Central Planning Board: 6,933,253. Left untaught "por diversas razones" ("for various reasons"): 271,000. The report divides that remainder by the whole population and gets 3.9 percent. It then says that 3.9 percent includes 25,000 Haitians in the farm zones of Oriente and Camagüey who did not speak Spanish and were "inalfabetizables" ("unteachable") in the campaign, plus people with physical or mental disabilities and people "declared unteachable" because of age or poor health, "con lo que puede decirse que, precisamente no hay analfabetos en Cuba" ("so that it can be said that, precisely, there are no illiterates in Cuba"). Point 6 says the index will never rise. Point 7 counts the teaching force as 121,000 popular alphabetizers, 100,000 Conrado Benítez brigadistas, 15,000 Patria o Muerte brigadistas, and 35,000 teachers: 271,000, or more than 300,000 once directors, political cadres, and administrative workers are added. The report says the underlying counts are open to the revolutionary government and to any international educational or scientific body.
- **Later official tables do not match the round numbers read aloud.** A 2017 Prensa Latina compilation, ratified in that article by the director of the literacy museum, gives 120,632 popular alphabetizers, 13,016 Patria o Muerte brigadistas, 105,664 Conrado Benítez students "de entre 10 y 18 años" ("between 10 and 18"), 34,772 volunteer teachers, 29,000 support activists, and 707,212 people taught. A 2016 *Granma* graphic says the average age of the student brigade was between 10 and 16, and that 52 percent were young women. Another historical study puts the same brigades at about 105,000 people aged 12 to 19. The rally's 100,000 and the later 105,664 are both state figures. This page does not collapse them.
- **1964, the outside look.** From 27 February to 27 March 1964, UNESCO sends Anna Lorenzetto and Karel Neys to study the methods used, not to take a new census. Juan Marinello's account in *Bohemia* quotes their report: apart from its technical side, the campaign "fue un hecho político" ("was a political fact"); the results, "incontestablemente positivos" ("incontestably positive"), can be understood only in light of the country's social and cultural aims; the secret of the result was not a technique but "la relación humana" ("the human relation"). The proclamation that Cuba was free of illiteracy was Havana's, on 22 December 1961. It was not a UNESCO declaration.

![Two adults writing at school desks in a classroom, one holding a copybook marked Cuaderno de practica de Espanol, Primer curso de superacion obrera y campesina](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/cuba-literacy-campaign-1961-unesco-evening-class-marianao-1967.jpg)

*Adults in an evening class at the Centro Especial Jorge Dimitrof, Marianao, near Havana, 1967. The copybook on the left is labelled "Cuaderno de práctica de Español", "Primer curso de superación obrera y campesina". Photograph by Dominique Roger, UNESCO Archives, via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.*

The Moncada attack, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution as an institution, OSPAAAL, the school system after 1961, and the crisis years through 2021 are other pages.

## How it works

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): the first lesson teaches three vowels and, in the same breath, a label. "Yankee imperialists" is doing the work of an argument about what the OAS is. A criticism that answers with "brainwashing," and never quotes the lesson, makes the same move from the other side: a loaded word in place of the text.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the student force is named for a dead teacher, marches to a hymn in his name, and ends the year under a flag that says the country is free of illiteracy. The prestige of a killed 18-year-old, and of the act of learning to read, is placed on the government's year. The primer's title is the same word Castro's speeches already end on.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): Benítez, and later Ascunce, are named persons whose deaths are asked to vouch for the campaign. Castro's line on 23 January, that the dead teacher will go on teaching, is the device in one sentence. A martyr can be a real victim and still be used as the argument.
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/): the manual's theme "Fidel is our leader," the letter to Fidel as the last test, and Castro's claim that only a people in revolution could have done this, join knowing how to read with belonging to the revolution. The state's own materials do not treat that join as a hidden extra. They treat it as the point. Asking what the test measured is, inside that frame, asking whether one is in the people who won.
- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): "territory free of illiteracy," "not a single illiterate," and "four and a half centuries of ignorance have been brought down" are victory words. Swap in a measure — read which page, write which letter, of people of which age — and the sentence changes. The report makes that swap itself, then walks it back: 3.9 percent remain, and those who remain are defined as unteachable, so none remain.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): each number in the 22 December report can be a real count and the rate can still be built from the wrong pile. The 1953 figure in use here is 23.6 percent of people older than 10 (José Alvarez, citing that census). The 3.9 percent is 271,000 divided by 6,933,253, the whole population, infants included. Those are not the same measure, set side by side as if they were. A criticism that drops the 979,207 located, the tests, and the fact of a large teaching force, and keeps only the political titles, stacks the other way. The same rule scores both.

## Then and now

In [Perón cumple, Evita dignifica: Argentina's state media machine, and the decree that erased it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/peron-evita-state-media/), Argentine first-grade readers of the early 1950s replace "mamá me ama" ("mummy loves me") with "Evita me ama," and a law makes Eva Perón's memoir compulsory school reading. Cuba's primer does the same kind of thing with a different text: the first letters a new reader meets are a political acronym, defined in the book as an enemy. In both, learning to read is also learning a name for loyalty.

The settings are not the same size or the same machine. Argentina's case is a school requirement plus a state information office that had already taken over radio networks and a leading opposition paper, and a later government that made the ousted leader's name a crime. Cuba's case is one year, a closed school term, and a teaching force sent to live in the houses of the learners, under a government that said in public that the lessons were revolutionary. The device travels. The scale, the channel, and what each state did to every other channel do not.

## Positions on the record

- **Havana, then and since:** the campaign is a battle the people won. Literacy and revolutionary formation are one task, not a school subject spoiled by politics. The dead teachers are martyrs of that battle. The 3.9 percent, once the "unteachable" are set aside, means there are no illiterates. The 1964 UNESCO mission is cited as outside confirmation of the result.
- **The criticism that the materials and the brigades were political formation:** the primer, the manual, the Varadero course, the letter to Fidel, and a year spent in a stranger's house were a political education of both the learner and the brigadista. Jorge Duany, quoted by PolitiFact in 2020, puts the scholarly consensus as he sees it: the government did raise the literacy rate, and it used the campaign for propaganda. Carolyn Davidson Abel, in the same article, says the work she reviewed looked like the basic literacy expected of a first grader in the United States, not like a higher bar and not like no teaching at all. Lorenzetto and Neys, as quoted by Marinello, call the campaign a political fact and call the results incontestably positive. The political-formation point is not a secret uncovered against the state's denial. It is the state's account, scored.
- **On the rate after 1961.** An essay in *Estudios Públicos*, citing Carmelo Mesa-Lago, *The Economy of Socialist Cuba* (1981), reads the 1970 census as about 13 percent illiterate among Cubans older than 15, against about 24 percent in 1953 on a comparable adult base, and notes that a later figure under 5 percent covered ages 15 to 49 rather than all adults. That is one scholar's reading of later censuses. It is not a number recalculated here. It does sit against the report's sentence that the index would never rise and that no illiterates remained.
- **What is documented:** the UN sentence and the 37.5 percent; the Year of Education speech; the primer's first lesson and the manual's theme list, as given in studies of the 1961 books; the letter to Fidel as the campaign's own final test; the report read on 22 December, including the division that produces 3.9 percent; the Lorenzetto–Neys mission's dates and Marinello's quotations from their report; Benítez's and Ascunce's names and the dates Cuban accounts give for their deaths.
- **What is not shown here:** a single illiteracy rate. The census base (23.6 percent of people older than 10), Castro's 37.5 percent at the UN, and the 3.9 percent of the whole population are three statements. A single headcount of brigadistas. The rally's round numbers and the later table's 105,664 and 707,212 do not match, and the published ages run from 10 to 19. A single death toll. The museum-ratified list in the 2017 Prensa Latina article names ten people killed in 1961 in connection with the teaching (Benítez, Ascunce, Lantigua, and seven others) and, separately, 42 deaths "from other causes" and 37 people wounded. This page does not decide which of those numbers is the campaign's dead, and it does not treat the hanging narratives or the "spy" motive as settled. It takes no position on Cuban education after the 1961 follow-up, or on the government's record beyond this campaign.

## Same-method test

A government of any party that printed a primer whose first lesson was an enemy acronym, named the teaching corps for a killed volunteer, made the literacy test a letter to the leader, and declared the country free of illiteracy by dividing the untaught remainder by the whole population, infants included, would be scored the same way here. A critic of any government who answered that record only with "brainwashing," and dropped the tests and the count of people taught, would be scored as name-calling and card-stacking on the same rules.

## How to spot it

- Read the first lesson. If the first word is a political name, ask what the letters teach besides the letters.
- When a victory rate appears, write down the numerator and the denominator. A share of "the whole population" is not a share of "people older than 10," and "the rest were unteachable, so there are none" is a definition, not a count.
- If the only word available for the other side is a slur, ask for the lesson text and the test. Formation can be real and a slur can still be a substitute for it.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sources below | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Fidel Castro at the UN General Assembly (1960) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fidel_Castro_-_UN_General_Assembly_1960.jpg) (Library of Congress, U.S. News & World Report, Warren K. Leffler) | Public domain (collection dedicated to the public) |
| Adult learner, Marianao (1967) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Literacy_-_UNESCO_-_PHOTO0000000135_0001.tiff) (UNESCO Archives, Dominique Roger) | CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO |
| Evening class, Marianao (1967) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adult_students,_Marianao_near_Havana_-_UNESCO_-_PHOTO0000000569_0001.tiff) (UNESCO Archives, Dominique Roger) | CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO |

### Image gaps

- **The cover and pages of *¡Venceremos!* and *Alfabeticemos* (Imprenta Nacional, 1961).** Studies reproduce them. No file verified as US public domain or CC was found for this page.
- **Photographs from 1961 itself.** The hosted UNESCO photographs are from 1967 and show a follow-on adult centre; the campaign's own field photographs are not hosted. The Commons photograph of a 1961 campaign picture at the literacy museum is a photograph of a museum display, so the display's own copyright was not cleared, and it was not used.
- **Conrado Benítez, Manuel Ascunce, the lantern, and the 22 December 1961 rally.** Cuban state archives and later commemorative pages hold photographs. Their licence was not verified as US public domain or CC.
- **The commission report as a document, rather than as a speech reprinted in *Granma*.** No open-licence scan was found.

## Sources

- Fidel Castro, [speech at the UN General Assembly, 26 September 1960](http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2018/09/23/texto-completo-del-historico-discurso-de-fidel-en-la-onu-el-26-de-setiembre-de-1960/), as published by Cubadebate.
- Fidel Castro, [speech at Ciudad Libertad, 31 December 1960](https://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/discursos/discurso-pronunciado-por-el-comandante-fidel-castro-ruz-en-ciudad-libertad), Oficina del Primer Ministro transcript, fidelcastro.cu.
- ["Vamos a librar la batalla contra el analfabetismo"](https://www.granma.cu/file/pdf/2016/12/22/G_2016122209.pdf), *Granma*, 22 December 2016, quoting the 29 August 1960 speech.
- Armando Hart, reading the National Literacy Commission's report, 22 December 1961, [reprinted by *Granma*](https://web.archive.org/web/20080501000514/http://granma.co.cu/alfabe40/dg1.html) for the 40th anniversary.
- Fidel Castro, [22 December 1961 speech](http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2021/12/22/campana-de-alfabetizacion-una-juventud-capaz-de-escribir-una-de-las-paginas-mas-hermosas-en-la-historia-de-la-educacion-y-de-la-cultura/), Cubadebate's republication, and the [short quotation](https://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/citas/22-de-diciembre-de-1961-1) on fidelcastro.cu.
- *¡Venceremos!* (Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, 1961), pp. 1-5, as quoted in English in Ann E. Halbert-Brooks, ["Revolutionary Teachers: Women and Gender in the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961"](https://maestraproductions.org/wp-content/uploads/women-gender-in-the-1961-literacy-campaign-by-a-halbert-brooks.pdf) (MA thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013).
- *¡Venceremos!* (1961), title sentence, and *Alfabeticemos* (1961), as analyzed by José Joaquim Pereira Melo, Roseli Gall do Amaral, and Dayane Colombo, ["Protagonismo e processos formativos"](http://educa.fcc.org.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-70432022000400277), *Revista da FAEEBA* 31, no. 68 (2022).
- Lesson titles, the three tests, and the letter to Fidel: ["Literacy campaign in Cuba. Remembrances from Yara"](https://revistas.udg.co.cu/index.php/roca/es/article/download/4301/10350), *Roca* (Universidad de Granma).
- Juan Marinello, ["El informe de la Unesco sobre la campaña cubana de alfabetización"](https://web.archive.org/web/20150506190734/http://www.bohemia.cu/centenario-bohemia-2/testimonio.html.html), *Bohemia*, quoting Anna Lorenzetto and Karel Neys, *Methods and Means Utilized in Cuba to Eliminate Illiteracy* (UNESCO, 1965); mission dates 27 February to 27 March 1964.
- José Alvarez, ["Cuban Agriculture Before 1959: The Social Situation"](https://journals.flvc.org/edis/article/download/113237/108416), EDIS FE480, University of Florida, 2004, on the 1953 census (23.6 percent of persons older than 10).
- Ernesto Montero Acuña, ["Cuba, la alfabetización lo cambió todo (II)"](https://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/articulos/cuba-la-alfabetizacion-lo-cambio-todo-ii), Prensa Latina, 21 December 2017, for the later headcount and the museum-ratified list of ten dead.
- Essay in [*Estudios Públicos*](http://www.estudiospublicos.cl/index.php/cep/article/download/1600/2733/) citing Carmelo Mesa-Lago, *The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two Decade Appraisal* (University of New Mexico Press, 1981), on the 1970 census reading.
- Jon Greenberg, ["Fact-checking Bernie Sanders' claim on Cuba literacy under Castro"](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/24/bernie-sanders/sanders-correct-cuba-literacy-campaign-skimps-prop/), PolitiFact, 24 February 2020, quoting Jorge Duany and Carolyn Davidson Abel.