Cuban Education between Revolution and Reform

IntroductionA reflection on the challenges facing public universities leads us to a theme (among many) of the centrality of the social sciences: how far should the state be, desired to be or actually be responsible for education in a country? Can direct government involvement produce favourable results in solving the educational problem? The analysis of the role of education cannot be done without a reflection about the State, the development models that are driven by this structure, the power groups that give it meaning, the kind of society that results and a holistic view of public policies (Del Castillo 2014) that serves as a tool (in a double sense) of governments to solve public problems that they themselves have defined in a (desired) dialogue with society. Just as it is essential to understand the State to analyse education, education also 'talks' about the kind of state and society in which it occurs.Education as a public issue is an idea as old as ancient Greece. Since then the state has been defined as the entity that is ultimately responsible for the formation of the citizens in the polis: the meaning of the State is, in its superior essence, the Paideia1 (Werner 1971). From this statement we return to the political status of (public) education.The debates on education as a public issue have transcended the field of research. They also exceed domestic politics, standing on the top of the global agenda. Today we find tensions between the models proposed by governments (pressured by international organisations) and those desired by society which have led to a climate of direct confrontation. We see examples of this everywhere: in the US and its most recent reform of the public school system, the education reforms passed in Mexico, the protests in the university student movement of Chile, the strike of teachers in Brazil, controversial university reform in Ecuador in recent years and the university student movement unleashed in Colombia in 2011 are a few of the flashpoints that demonstrate the social dynamics around the problems facing the education sector in general and universities in particular.The consequences of the neoliberal educational model (Gentili 1996; Puiggros 1996) have challenged the assumed direct link between education and development, although the World Bank insists on it (Banco Mundial 2012) and unresolved social problems in the Latin American region such as poverty, inequality and inequity (Blanco, 2012; Gajardo 2012) only serve to trigger deep crises in the current paradigms of the social function of education and what it implies: the confrontation between reality and utopia.Immersed in this scenario, the Cuban case is symptomatic of a different situation, though not without its own tensions. In recent years, the government and Cuban society have been involved in a major process of change: according to many, the most important in the last 50 years. The changes are projected in the Guidelines of the Economic and Social Policy of the Party and the Revolution (adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba 2011 and ratified by the National Assembly of Popular Power in the same year ) and include new directions for the economy, labour policies, taxation, immigration and education, among others. They are an expression of a macro-policy discourse that presents us with the aim of streamlining the national economy, in the interests of improving the Cuban socialist system, by making it prosperous and sustainable. According to the government, we are facing an updating of the economic model, but without political changes,2 so that the two main axes of the current reforms are aimed, first, to implement measures aimed at improving national economic efficiency and, second, to support and strengthen the historical ideological precepts of the Cuban Revolution, most emphatically through education.Within the package of proposed reforms, one of the routes of change designed by the government relates to education, specifically in universities. …