Comisión Nacional de Alfabetización - Ministerio de Educación (cover designer: unknown), "Alfabeticemos: Manual para el Alfabetizador," 1961. Offset print, booklet.

"Alfabeticemos" - Literacy Teacher's Manual (1961)

A well-worn teacher's manual from Cuba's historic 1961 National Literacy Campaign, used by the young alfabetizadores (literacy workers) who fanned out across the island to teach reading and writing. The simple green cover with its documentary photograph of outdoor literacy instruction captures the grassroots, improvisational spirit of the campaign—education could happen anywhere, even "under a tree," as Fidel Castro famously declared.

This manual provided practical guidance for the approximately 100,000 literacy brigadistas, most of them teenagers and young adults, who left their homes to live and work in rural communities. The back cover bears the campaign's powerful motto: "Ser Cultos Para Ser Libres" (Be Educated to Be Free), alongside quotes from Fidel Castro and José Martí emphasizing education as both a right and a duty.

Published by the Revolutionary Government's Ministry of Education and printed at the Imprenta Nacional de Cuba during the "Año de la Educación" (Year of Education), this booklet represents one of Latin America's most ambitious social programs. This copy later entered the collection of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York, an organization founded in 1972 to promote understanding of revolutionary Cuba.