Deepening Participation: The impact of Cuba''s local university centres

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a radical new approach to higher education in Cuba, as the country began slowly to recover from the economic and social devastation of the 1990s: the decision to establish local university sites in every one of its 169 municipalities. From a sector dominated by White, urban youth, participation widened to include people and, vitally, places that had been excluded or viewed as peripheral. In a country of 11 million people, university enrolments reached almost 750,000, offering unprecedented access to higher learning and creating a mass of new professionals who would go on to transform their localities.

This book lays out those local transformations, drawing on interviews and workshops with students, teachers and policymakers from six very different communities in the mountainous eastern province of Granma. Their testimony highlights the interconnectedness of individual and collective change, the importance of situated pedagogy and the direct impact of higher learning on communities material and cultural development. Setting their experiences of the programme against the controversies that beset it brings into focus, again and again, the competing priorities of equality, social value, economic realities, academic excellence and political conformity: essentially, the debate over what and who higher education is for.
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