Brigadista
브리가디스타
A Spanish word meaning a member of a brigade (brigada), used historically for the volunteer teachers mobilized in literacy campaigns. In the 1961 Cuban literacy campaign it covered the teenage student volunteers sent to the countryside as well as the adult worker and professional teacher brigades, and the young volunteers of Nicaragua's 1980 National Literacy Crusade took the same name. Unlike the Soviet likbez, which denotes the campaign itself, it names the individual mobilized teacher.
In depth
Root of the word
Spanish dictionaries gloss brigadista as a member of a brigade (brigada), which may be an armed formation or a group of people. The use of the word for a volunteer teacher in a literacy campaign is this general definition with a historical context attached to it.
The name became internationally known during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938. Volunteers of the International Brigades, organized by the Comintern in support of the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, were called brigadistas, and roughly thirty-two thousand such volunteers served over the course of the war.
Cuba, 1961
The main context of brigadista mobilization is the Cuban literacy campaign. Preparations began in 1960 and the campaign was carried out in 1961, ending on 22 December 1961 when Cuba was declared a territory free of illiteracy.
Volunteers were organized in four categories. The largest was the Conrado Benítez Brigade, some hundred thousand young people aged ten to nineteen who left school and lived with peasant families in the countryside. Then came the popular alphabetizers, adult volunteers who taught in cities and towns; the Fatherland or Death Brigade, some fifteen thousand adult workers who taught for wages in remote rural areas while fellow workers covered their jobs; and the professional teachers' brigade, which supervised the technical and organizational side of the campaign. By late summer 1961 the campaign comprised about 178,000 popular alphabetizers, 30,000 worker brigadistas, and 100,000 Conrado Benítez brigadistas. Roughly one million Cubans are estimated to have taken part directly as teachers or students.
Dispatch, training, and cost
Castro brought the school year forward so that students could join the campaign over the summer. About 105,000 students formed the Conrado Benítez Brigade and received a week of intensive training, participation requiring parental permission. Training took place at the Varadero camp. Those dispatched were issued a standard grey uniform, a blanket, a hammock, two textbooks, and a kerosene lamp for evening classes, and the lamp became the emblem of the brigade. The textbooks were Alfabeticemos for the teacher and Venceremos for the student.
The dispatched teachers were the product of a campaign intended to bring urban and rural strata into contact. Urban teachers were posted to the countryside and required to live as peasants did, and Castro told the teachers in 1961 that they would teach and would learn. Through this experience urban volunteers learned for the first time of the poor conditions of rural people.
The experience carried risks. Because of their ties to the Cuban government, young teachers were targeted by the Escambray rebel forces and were sometimes killed; ten died. Among the dead were the teacher Manuel Ascunce Domenech and Pedro Lantigua, the owner of the house where he was staying. There are numerous claims that these rebels received support from the United States government. Some parents, fearing that their children would leave home to teach under military supervision, sent them out of Cuba through Operation Peter Pan.
Nicaragua, 1980
In Nicaragua the National Literacy Crusade ran from 3 March to 23 August 1980 and extended to literacy work in English, Miskito, and Sumo. Its young volunteers were called brigadistas after those who served in the Cuban campaign. They not only taught rural people to read and write but were integrated into their households, bridging the gap between countryside and city, and about sixty percent of them were women. Some sixty thousand young people of high-school and university age and thirty thousand adults took part after two weeks of training. On 23 March thousands set out from Managua across the country, joined by thousands of teachers sent by Cuba and by international cooperants.
Both results and reaction are recorded. The illiteracy rate fell from more than fifty percent to about thirteen percent, and to twelve percent within a year. Nine brigadistas were killed in attacks by counter-revolutionary forces, the first of them Jorgino Andrade on 18 May 1980. Russian- and Spanish-language encyclopedias identify the CIA and the Reagan administration as the forces that organized and funded the counter-revolutionaries. Some brigadistas had no direct connection to the government or the Sandinistas, and the campaign was also criticized for the politicization of its materials and as a humanitarian propaganda instrument of the regime.
Discrepant figures
Participant counts and ages differ by source. English Wikipedia records the Conrado Benítez Brigade as aged ten to nineteen and about one hundred thousand strong, while Spanish Wikipedia gives 105,664 members and an age range of seven to nineteen. The exact size and age range of the corps are not treated as settled figures.