ABSTRACT
The performance of the Cuban educational system offers valuable insight into the objectives, achievements, and difficulties of three decades of socialist development. While a paucity of scholarship on Cuban education after the 1970s justifies an examination of recent policies and outcomes, 1 it is the widespread speculation about Cuba’s future in the dramatically altered international context of the 1990s that recommends why and where insight is indeed needed. For example, in assessing Cuba’s economic prospects given the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and the tightening of an ongoing U.S. embargo, the technical and scientific capacity created by the educational system is a critical issue. Similarly, in evaluating the legitimacy of the role and rule of Castro or the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) 55—key disputes in the internationalized debates about Cuban politics, the effectiveness of socialization through the schooling process is a crucial question. The purpose of this essay is to use educational policy to look at Cuban socialism and the current reform process called rectificación (rectification), focusing specifically on women and the socialist state.
