Havana: The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, congratulated the educators of the Island, who celebrate their Day today, by commemorating the closing of the literacy campaign in 1961, Prensa Latina publishes.
Cuba’s masterpiece: planting schools. Congratulations to our consecrated educators, the Cuban head of state wrote on his Twitter account.
On December 22 of that year, at the Revolution Square in Havana, Fidel Castro announced the end of the Literacy Campaign and Cuba was proclaimed a territory free of illiteracy.
As a result of this initiative, 707,200 people learned to read and write, which reduced the illiterate rate to 3.9 percent, and provided free and universal access to the different levels of education.
In Cuba there were 979,200 people who could not read or write in 1961, and more than 800,000 children between the ages of 5 and 15 did not attend school before the revolutionary triumph of 1959.
Recently, the Cuban National Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) recognized that the Literacy Campaign, ‘unprecedented in Latin America and the Caribbean’, constituted a starting point for the remarkable further educational advances made by the country ‘.