Seated on folding metal chairs beneath unblinking fluorescent lights, 20 party members and sympathizers listened with furrowed brows. Within them, viscous office coffee battled a starchy pasta dinner. Around them flowed the verbiage of body counts, genocide, imperialist war and the oil greed of collapsing capitalism.
At their front was an array of English and Spanish political posters; at their back, tomes of Marxist history and theory, including those by Leon Trotsky, on whose beliefs the party is based.
A timid knock came at the door, followed by a woman's puzzled face and the unlikely question: "Would this happen to be an AA meeting?"
It was anything but. This was a precursor to the revolution -- the long-awaited day when dispossessed workers and farmers will rise and capitalism and its attendant abuses will be chunked onto history's ash heap.
Though American Marxism never got off the ground and Soviet-style socialism crashed in economic and social failure, Houston's small band of devoted communists believes the glorious red dawn is, as history measures time, right around the corner.
When it comes, they will be ready.
"We think this is the best time in our history to be Marxists," said Jacquie Henderson, the Canadian-born chapter chairwoman who once played baseball against Cuba's Fidel Castro. "Our prospects have never been so good."***
The Chairman smiles/"Let's do our Job! In 1961, Cuban schools close for several months. All students go to the countryside to teach the population reading and writing. Illiteracy is reduced from around thirty percent to virtually zero. Alphabetization serves political purposes too: illiterate people are unable to help building the new society. The exercise books use words and concepts from revolutionary practice, such as 'cooperation' and 'agrarian reform'
August 8, 2003 - Cuban Educators Spark Political Storm in Venezuela***The Venezuelan literacy campaign, which began in July has drawn heavy criticism from Chavez' opponents, who say he wants to "Cubanize" the world's No. 5 oil exporter and will use the education program to deepen his own self-styled revolution. Indeed, Castro set up a similar project in 1961 sending 250,000 teachers across the country in a yearlong project to teach one million Cubans to read.
But Eliecer Otayza, a former army colleague of Chavez who heads the "Mission Robinson: I Can Do It" program to teach reading and writing skills, dismisses such criticism. The education program, he says, is simply a cultural accord between two countries. The program is named after Simon Bolivar's teacher Simon Rodriguez, nicknamed "Robinson."
"Without a doubt, it is an ambitious plan to educate one million people," said Otayza, president of the INCE national education institute, where the Caribbean accents of Cuban teachers are now a familiar sound. More than 100,000 Venezuelans are to be trained as teachers.
Chavez, who survived a brief coup in 2002 and a crippling oil strike in December and January, says teaching the approximately 1.5 million illiterate people -- about 9 percent of the adult population -- to read is vital to the nation's progress.
The education program is one of several joint projects between Cuba and Venezuela. Under an accord signed between Chavez and Castro in 2000, Venezuela supplies 53,000 barrels of crude daily to Cuba and Havana has sent doctors, sugar industry technicians, sports trainers and agricultural experts to Caracas.
Since his election on a populist platform in 1998, Chavez has moved Venezuela away from traditional allies such as the United States in favor of stronger ties with China, Libya, Iran, Iraq and Cuba.
………..Castro's 1961 education campaign, which aimed make one million people literate through a program of phonetic repetition, virtually paralyzed Cuba when about 250,000 volunteers fanned out across the country over a year. But as a result, Communist-run Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America.
The Venezuelan program is based on a method developed by Cuban teacher Leonela Relys, who said that within three months, using 65 audiovisual classes and an exercise book, students could learn to write their names, read with minimum proficiency and write simple messages and letters. Cuba is donating 50,000 television sets to aid the literacy drive.
"It is a revolutionary technique," Otayza said. "There are other methods, but this is a revolutionary technique that gets results. It's a Venezuelan-Cuban method we have adopted."
But the program has plenty of skeptics.
"I don't believe it. How are they going to do that in three months when in Cuba it took a yearlong nonstop campaign that covered all corners of the country?" said Ismael Orta, a Cuban educator now settled in Miami.
Orta, who graduated in 1976 from Havana University as a middle school English teacher, acknowledges that many people learned to read and write under the Cuban literacy drive.
"The teachings of the spelling book, which had 15 lessons, ended with a letter which read, 'Now you can read and write. Thank you, Fidel.' People would read it and weep. It was all a show." ***
Chávez's school plans ignite furor in Venezuela ***New history texts for fourth- and sixth-graders published in 1999 praised Chávez's coup attempt and branded as ``corrupt oligarchies'' the two parties that ruled Venezuela since the late 1950s, Democratic Action and COPEI. Chávez has also greatly expanded a system of paramilitary classes in public high schools that had long been on the books but were seldom held, portraying them as ``the founding stones of the new Venezuelan man.''
``He is promoting militarism, infecting texts with viruses that foster class hatreds ... and speak against globalization and privatization,'' Raffalli said in an interview. Chávez recently signed a deal with Cuba under which Havana will train Venezuelan teachers and provide educational materials, and Education Minister Hector Navarro last year approved a nationwide essay competition on the life of Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ``Ché'' Guevara.***