An Island off Indoctrination

Castro's experiment in revolutionary education

For months, reports have circulated in Europe and the U.S. about Cuban "kidnapings": African youths, taken involuntarily from their peasant homes and flown to Fidel Castro's country for ideological indoctrination. Jonas Savimbi, leader of the anti-Marxist, rebel UNITA movement in Angola, has even used the word slavery to describe what is taking place. The stories, which are given some credence by Western observers in Africa, cast a shadow over one of the Cuban President's proudest achievements: the creation of 15 revolutionary schools on the Isle of Youth.

Lying some 60 miles off the southwest coast of Cuba, the lush island--formerly known as the Isle of Pines--is swept by breezes scented by countless pine trees and grapefruit groves. The island has an unsavory past: before Castro's revolution it housed the Presidio, one of the most brutal prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Castro was incarcerated there for 20 months in 1954-55.

Today there are some 11,000 students, aged twelve to 18, from Central America and Africa on the island, along with 19,000 young Cubans, learning the fundamentals of math, physics, chemistry--and Marxist ideology. TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott, who visited the island, found plenty of regimentation, but no readily detectable evidence that the youths are there against their will. There may well be exceptions, but if so, they are effectively subdued by group pressure. Scott's report, after a two-day tour:

"!Oye!" shouted a Cuban teacher standing beside a battered Soviet bus. "iVenga, venga, venga [Hurry up]!" Emerging silently like guerrillas from behind endless rows of grapefruit trees were 25 Mozambican boys, dressed in well-washed jeans and carrying sharp, long-bladed pruning knives. Striding in an orderly single file onto the bus that would carry them to lunch at their school, the boys burst spontaneously into well-harmonized songs praising African solidarity and the works of their country's President, Samora Machel. "They are always singing," beamed the Cuban teacher. "It's part of their national tradition."

The routine of the schools is almost military in nature. Except when they are working in the fields (usually about three hours a day), the youths are dressed in blue uniforms with red kerchiefs and red berets, the standard garb of Cuba's own "young pioneers." The students are roused at 6 a.m., take breakfast (typically ham, bread and milk) in carefully ordered sittings at the school's mess hall. They are held responsible for the neatness of their dorms, which are crowded with double-decker bunks; each student has shelves by his bed to store books and clothing.

Students at each school are separated into 15 groups, which engage in a weekly competition, judged by the teachers, for neatness, attentiveness in class, and work performance in the fields. The top three groups are awarded flags that they carry proudly aloft as they march out to the fields and back again.

The school buildings are virtually identical: breezy, modern four-story structures, awash with portraits of Marx and Lenin. Classrooms are brightly colored, equipped with the latest audiovisual aids, and neatly arranged with rows of sleek, polished-wood tables. Each nationality represented on the island has its own school. The curriculums vary somewhat. Students from Namibia (Southwest Africa), for example, are taught English grammar, while those from Angola and Mozambique learn Portuguese. Cuban instructors normally teach academic subjects like math or biology, but the teaching of social sciences and ideology is reserved for men and women teachers imported from the students' homelands. "They are here not to forget that they are Namibians," said one teacher. "They are not here to become particularly Cuban." The "revolutionary" part of instruction would typically include the history of the country's colonial past, its place in the non-aligned movement and its economic problems.

"We have discussion groups and exchanges of views," says Bernard Kamwi, a Namibian teacher. "We talk about building a just society, how to eradicate the capitalist system, how to give the toiling masses of Namibia a say in what is happening."

In fact, views are not so much exchanged as imposed. The classroom ambience is strict, and the rote method of learning prevails. A question is asked. Hands are raised aloft by students eager to give the answer.

The correct response is then recited by all students in unison. Recent visitors to the Angolan school were invited to witness a sort of stage show. Part of it consisted of cheerful tribal songs and dances, but then the program became political.

Students re-enacted the "Kassinga massacre," an incident in which South African forces attacked guerrillas from the air. As the students performed it, the scene was an African version of Guernica. A tape recorder played a screeching sound track of an air attack and gunshots. Students acted out people being hit from the air and falling dead; others played comrades who picked up the wounded. There was an impassioned song, the gist of its message being, "We will never forget Kassinga." At the end, the students formed massed ranks, shook their fists and chanted, "We shall never give up. We shall win. Down with imperialism."

Life on the island is not all work and no play. Each of the schools has a soccer field and courts for basketball and volleyball. There are barbershops for the boys and hairdressing salons for girls, most of whom are coiffed with intricate "corn-row" braids. On Sundays there are bus trips to nearby beaches or sightseeing tours of the island. Sex is not a problem, the teachers insist. "They are told the facts of life, but there is no formal sex education as such," said a Mozambican instructor. Girls are free to talk with women teachers about the problems of puberty. "They have biology classes," said a Namibian ideologue, "but as elsewhere in the world, the kids do not apply biology to themselves." He may be right. Since the program is so full and disciplined, there would appear to be little time for love among the grapefruit trees.

The students claim not to miss their homelands, but there is a certain mechanical, programmed quality to the answers they give to questions about their future. Asked about her ambitions, a 16-year-old Angolan girl responded, "My desire is to continue my career to help my country. It is for Angola to decide whether I stay in Cuba to get my higher education." To the same question, a young Mozambican boy answered, "The party in Mozambique will be my guide. I would like to continue my studies, but if it is decided otherwise, I will return home."

Most of the students on the Isle of Youth will eventually return to their homelands, and they fervently express the wish to do so. Castro, in setting up this educational program, at some cost to Cuba, has reinforced his claim to leadership of the Third World. He has taken largely unformed young Africans and Latin Americans from a peasant society and turned them into disciplined young technicians, thoroughly indoctrinated in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Inevitably, the graduates of the Isle of Youth will have a profound impact on the spread and consolidation of socialist movements in troubled nations for many years to come.

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