• Submitted by: admin
• Arts and Culture
• Caribbean
• Ciego de Avila
• culture an traditions
• Destinations
• Education
• history
• Literature
• personalities
• Politics and Government
• 12 / 29 / 2008

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At the initiative of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, this noble crusade spread all over the national territory 47 years ago. The objective was teaching to read and write those who had never had the opportunity to learn.

Rafael Nazco Sotolongo, the Coordinator General of the Campaign in the territory of Ciego de Ávila, who conserved the valuable graphic testimony of that historical endeavor and delivered it to Mayda Pérez García, the director of the institution.

The pictures show different moments of the Campaign and from now on will enlarge the documental funds of the Historical Archive, where there are also, records, declarations of territories free of illiteracy, primers, books, letters, among other valuable documents.

Nazco Sotolongo, 82 years old and founder of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba (PURSC) and the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). In a brief dialogue with the audience that attended the solemn ceremony, narrated his experiences in that campaign, of which thousands of local residents took part either as members of the Conrado Benítez or Patria o Muerte (Homeland or Death) brigades.

Neither the murders of the teacher Manuel Ascunce Doménech and his student Pedro Lantigua, nor that of the voluntary teacher Conrado Benítez, perpetrated by those who wanted Cuba sunk in ignorance, could impede the fact that, by the end of the Campaign, over one million Cubans had learned how to read and write and eventually the national territory was declared Free of Illiterates.

(Invasor.cu)