My Embrace of Politics: A Cuban Public High School in the 1950s

Abstract

My Embrace of Politics:A Cuban Public High School in the 1950s Samuel Farber (bio) I am the youngest of three children born, on the eve of World War II, to a Polish Jewish couple who separately immigrated to Cuba in the 1920s, met each other, married, raised a family, and became Cuban citizens. Along with my siblings, I attended the largest bilingual Yiddish-Spanish elementary school in Old Havana, a good distance (seven miles) from my home in the neighboring city of Marianao. Although it was there that I began to openly rebel against what I perceived as unjust behavior by my superiors toward me and others, it was only after I entered a far more diverse public high school in Marianao, in September 1951, shortly before General Fulgencio Batista's coup d'état in March 1952, that I became politicized in my second year of high school, at the young age of thirteen. This was not an uncommon pattern in the Cuba and Latin America of that period, full of revolts against the many military dictatorships supported by US Cold War foreign policy. I liked my new school. The double sessions (half a session in Spanish for the regular subjects and half a session in Yiddish for the Jewish subjects) in the Jewish elementary school, which I badly resented for the distance I had to travel back and forth twice each day, had thankfully been replaced by either a morning or an afternoon session (depending on the academic year), with a few extra hours a week in the other half session for labs and physical education. There were of course major social differences between the two schools. The majority of the students at the Jewish elementary school came from the lower to the upper rungs of middle-class families, with a substantial minority of poor students and a spattering of wealthy kids. Most of those middle-class students were, like I had been, the children of tenderos (shopkeepers) who sold clothing and related dry goods. My parents had been tenderos too, but by the time I began attending the Jewish school, they had sold their small clothing store to a relative to become full-time middlemen in the wholesale business of manufacturing working men's pants. In a manner similar to the "jobber" in the New York garment industry of the mid-twentieth century, my parents' work, performed in a small warehouse next to our house, consisted of having the fabric for the pants cut by size and distributing the finished product according to their clients' orders. The pants were sewn together and ironed outside their warehouse by contractors who worked for them and other small firms like theirs. [End Page 282] My public high school, the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de Marianao, was a totally different world. Although the children of lower-middle-class and middle-class families were a large and important group, there were far more working-class and poor students than at the Jewish school. Students were charged a modest tuition that was discreetly and almost automatically waived for those who could not afford it. Because it was located right across the street from Cuba's main army headquarters at Camp Columbia, a considerable number of my fellow students were the children of military men. These included hardly any high military officers, who would have almost certainly sent their children to private high schools whether secular, Catholic, or, in some cases, Protestant. (Notwithstanding their military background, I found out later on as things began to heat up in my school after Batista's coup that only a very small number of those students supported the Batista coup and his nonideological, corrupt and repressive dictatorship. However, they tended to abstain from openly expressing their skepticism or opposition to the government for fear of risking their fathers' jobs.) The most striking contrast with my elementary school was, of course, that while the approximately three hundred students in my Jewish school were all children of East European Jewish immigrants, there were no more than twenty or twenty-five Jews, almost all Ashkenazi, among the approximately one thousand students in my high school. This was obviously a...