The two things of which Cuba is most proud, and which it most emphasizes, are health care and education. The campaign to make all illiterate Cubans literate within one year was announced by Fidel Castro in his speech to the United Nations in 1960. By 1961 the campaign had largely succeeded. This remarkable effort is memorialized in the National History Museum, "a small building located in Ciudad Escolar Libertad, formerly known as Columbia, the Batista regime's armed forces main headquarters.
"Located across the former headquarters, and just a few meters from the mansion that the dictator occupied when he was a General, the small institution treasures, among other objects, uniforms worn by literacy campaign participants, books, manuals, a blackboard hit by bullets shot during the Bay of Pigs invasion, pictures and personal belongings of the teachers murdered by counterrevolutionary gangs during the literacy drive and the Chinese made lamps used at night in the most remote places of the Cuban countryside. "
(click to enlarge) The Director of the National Literacy Museum
(click to enlarge) The Director holding a Chinese-made and -donated lamp used to provide light for after-dark literacy sessions in the countryside.