Taking a page out
of Cuba's book hardly wise
Carlos Alberto Montaner.
Posted on Tue, Jan. 27, 2004 in The
Miami Herald.
Lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez explained
it very clearly at the recent Monterrey
summit: He and his nation are profoundly
grateful to Fidel Castro's government for
the help it provides in the field of education.
Thanks to the Cuban teachers and the teaching
systems provided by Cuba, illiteracy will
soon disappear from Venezuela and 400,000
youngsters will swiftly graduate from high
school and enter, without further ado, municipal
universities instantly created for that
purpose.
Venezuela, then, will soon be a luminous
focus of culture, like the Medicis' Florence
or Vienna in the late 19th Century, and
hopes are high that before 2010 the first
Venezuelan astronaut will lift off from
the Bolivarian Interplanetary Base at Sabaneta,
birthplace of the colorful President Chávez.
Anyway, two days before traveling to Monterrey,
by then very sure of his new pedagogical
expertise, Chávez described Dr. Condoleezza
Rice, President Bush's principal national-security
advisor and former Stanford University provost,
as ''an illiterate,'' among other insults.
And, to remedy that official's lamentable
handicap, he announced he was rushing to
her a copy of the Robinson Method so she
could learn her first letters.
Teaching compliance
The Robinson Method assigns a number to
each letter -- so the student can learn
arithmetic at the same time -- and it seems
that in a few weeks adults can read sentences
like: ''My mother loves me, but I love the
revolution.'' Sometimes the sentences are
reversed and the students, unable to avoid
a certain Freudian angst that makes them
squirm at their desks, can spell out with
a touch of guilt: "My mother loves
the revolution, but I love my mother.''
While Chávez made his triumphant
announcements in Mexico, the government
in Havana announced that it was barring
access to the Internet to private citizens
who do not pay for the service in dollars,
a step that in practice means denying to
99 percent of Cubans all possibilities of
obtaining information freely through the
Internet.
Simultaneously, thanks to patroling informers
who enter houses without prior notice, efforts
were redoubled to uncover who owned concealed
parabolic antennas capable of picking up
TV channels from abroad, who owned undeclared
video recorders or video collections with
movies and documentaries deemed to be dangerous.
When those ''subversive'' materials are
found, they are instantly confiscated, the
owner is charged with possession of ''enemy
propaganda and the means to spread it''
-- which may be punishable by several years'
imprisonment. And in many cases the ''counter-revolutionary's''
home is taken away, or the family's telephone
service is forever cut off.
Unjust imprisonment
Strictly speaking, these abuses can anger
us but they cannot surprise us. They have
been happening for decades. Dozens of people
sitting in Cuban prisons have been sentenced
to 20 years' imprisonment for lending books
from their humble ''independent libraries''
set up in some shabby room in their homes.
A summary of this situation is truly sad.
The main and almost sole political objective
of Communist dictatorships -- the government
model that Chávez so admires -- is
to keep the people from obtaining a pluralistic
view of reality. The aim is to permit only
one voice, one single interpretation of
past, present and future events, one single
source of knowledge and wisdom. There is
no citizens' participation. There is a choir,
a harmonious choir forced to repeat the
litany imposed by the government.
There are no institutions. There are stables,
where people are locked up so that they
may rehearse, over and over, the words and
music written by the infallible and implacable
master, the owner of all truth.
That is perhaps the worst torment inflicted
by socialism: To educate for obedience,
not for freedom. To give people the chance
to read, but only so they can repeat --
like parrots -- the sacred textbooks selected
by the bureaucrats. To teach them to write,
even in good script, but only so they can
copy, over and over, the marvelous speech
delivered by the beloved leader.
That is the reason for the unending melancholy
felt by the ''intelligentsia'' in totalitarian
countries. No one is as unhappy as the person
who finds himself obliged to sell his words
and his conscience to an all-powerful boss.
Nothing causes greater pain or personal
shame than to live, day after day, the mismatch
between what one thinks, what one says and
what one does. That's the source of all
anxieties and numerous deep depressions.
Forcing justification
Why do jailers go through the effort of
educating those who they plan to castrate
intellectually? The first reason, the propaganda
reason, is terribly selfish: To use that
popular education -- transformed into statistical
data -- to build an alibi that will justify
the dictatorship.
The second reason is perverse: It is always
more convenient to have educated rather
than ignorant slaves, as long as they obey
docilely.
I don't know which of these reasons prevails
today in Chávez's heart. But if he
achieves his purpose he's going to do his
compatriots a lot of harm.
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