Iflew out to Cuba in January as guest of the Casa de las Américas, an organization roughly corresponding to the British Council, but with a lively publishing house appended, also a first-class literary magazine. I was invited to form one of a jury of five to judge the annual poetry prize open to unpublished books from any part of Spanish America. Prizes are also offered for the novel, book of short stories, drama and sociological essay, and juries were assembled from various countries for each. I was the only British juror. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg from the usa was my colleague on the poetry panel. The rest were entirely from Spanish America or Spain.

The first thing to impress me was the educational drive. Actual illiteracy has been more or less abolished, though classes were still being held at breakfast time in the bowels of our huge hotel for the hard core back ward readers and calculators among the staff. The lift-men, by contrast persistently read on the job, carrying one past one’s floor to the next full stop. The slogan is ‘All to the sixth grade!’, and the schools were what the Cubans most wanted us to see. Six years of free education with books, food, clothing, and, where necessary, board in the former houses of the rich, lead on to scholarships as far as a child can go. This overhauls Mexico, hitherto educationally the most advanced country in Latin America. Education is really universal in Cuba; Mexico is still trying to ensure that there will, in fact, be a place for every child. In Mérida, which I visited afterwards, there clearly wasn’t. ‘All to the sixth grade’ entails much adult education. The newspapers carry frequent quizzes; if you can’t answer them, then you haven’t reached the sixth grade standard. The need for new teachers is consequently very great, and youngsters are sent out to work in the village schools at 14 or 15, to be brought back for refresher courses after a couple of years. New schools are being put up rapidly, two of the largest on former barrack sites, one on the edge of Havana, and another deep in the country.

Early results of the educational drive can already be seen in the book-shops. Several publishing houses, pursuing different editorial policies but all ultimately under state control, are producing and selling as many books as paper stringency will allow. Particularly interesting are cheap editions of the ‘modern classics’, which sell more quickly than anything else: Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, the short stories of Julio Cortázar (a very fine Argentinian novelist), and the collected poetry of Luis Cernuda and Antonio Machado (recent Spanish poets of the first rank). The literary taste, even of the young, seems to be conservative. A girl student produced a typed copy of The Waste Land—Eliot’s poems are, like most English books, unobtainable—and asked me to help out her inadequate English. Eliot and Dylan Thomas are the last two English names generally known.