Deepening Participation

The participants

Much of this account of the local university centres is in the words of those involved in the programme in six municipalities in Granma. Those words come from 240 semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, policy- makers and community leaders, conducted in 2017 and 2018, and from six follow-up workshops in 2019 involving, in total, 50 of the original interviewees.

The research would have been impossible without the day-to-day guidance and collaboration of the University of Granma and its Centre for Local Development Studies (CEDDEL). Together, we identified which municipalities I should work in to give me the broadest range of experience, and they arranged for me to have an advisor in each locality. These advisors were of paramount importance to me and have shaped this book, in many ways, as much as I have. Always an employee of the local university centre, they would co-ordinate my schedule, find potential interviewees and accompany me in my work.

This meant that my experience in each municipality was totally distinct. In some, I passed only a few days, whereas I spent many weeks in others, returning on multiple occasions. In some, a clear schedule had been worked out before my arrival, after communication with CEDDEL; in others, the advisor would discuss my project with me and look for interviewees according to my preferences; the most rewarding examples were where, rather than simply meeting my requests, they grasped my motivations and interests and creatively sought out voices and experiences I could not have known to ask for. Sometimes, the work was completed largely at the university centre, meaning that I came to understand and feel part of the institution; in other municipalities, most interviews took place in people’s homes and workplaces, giving a fuller understanding of how educational experiences were embedded into everyday life. The advisor’s academic specialism, interests and personality all contributed to the people they chose for me to meet and, as a consequence, the histories and perspectives that are included in this book.

In the chapters that follow, participants do not simply tell their individual stories; they are also the key critical voices within the text, analysing the interaction between policy and practice, and between the education of individuals and the development of their communities, and telling us what it all means. Every aspect of the narrative and analysis that can be is presented in their words. My voice, as author, is secondary and is used principally to connect their reflections and offer context for an international readership. This is done for a number of reasons.

Firstly, and most simply, they are experts on their experiences and offer knowledge that is just not available elsewhere. Almost nothing has been written outside of Latin America about the municipalisation of the Cuban university. Within Cuba, a couple of edited books and many hundreds of internally published articles and conference papers outline municipal organisational and pedagogic strategies, but there has yet to be an overarching account of municipalisation or a meaningful analysis of the subjective impact of mass access to higher education for individual Cubans and their communities.² The only people who held that knowledge were those who had lived the experience.

Secondly, writing the first broad account of the process available outside of Cuba meant I had a responsibility to go beyond the basic requirements for institutional ethical approval³ and consider the unequal power relations of me, as a foreign researcher, telling someone else’s story. Those who are not part of the groups they study must be cautious of speaking as ‘experts’ about and for those identities. Even where such work is respectful and informed, it is hard not to experience it, at least to some degree, as exploitative or silencing, particularly when the writer’s own career or status is enhanced by the work and the position of those studied remains essentially unchanged.

One Latin American response to these issues can be found in testimonio – the tradition of first-person narrative by a member of a marginalised or subaltern group (often spoken and then recorded by a ‘mediator’) that reflects a wider reality experienced by that group (Basile, 2020). A key aim of this activist literary form is that these voices should challenge dominant and colonialist discourses as an equal and alternative form of knowledge (Kumaraswami, 2006).

While this text is certainly built on first-person testimony and reflects conceptions of higher education and community that offer profound challenges to the commodification of learning in capitalist countries across both the Global North and much of the Global South, it differs from testimonio in two important regards. Firstly, my authorial role goes well beyond that of mediator and, secondly, the participants are not marginalised or subaltern, except in certain, very specific, regards.

Of the 240 interviewees, 119 are or were university lecturers – my academic and professional peers – and others include politicians, cultural authorities, community leaders, teachers and engineers. While a few could be described as marginalised in their communities, most are not. They are respected, integrated and educated. Where marginalisation occurs is largely at the point of interaction with national and international external others.

Notwithstanding the high standards of scholarship within the country, it is extremely challenging for Cuban academics to find opportunities to publish abroad. Similarly, despite the relaxation of restrictions in recent years, it remains complex and expensive for Cubans to travel abroad, with most opportunities for conferences and research overseas going to a small number of established academics working in Havana. Limited access to the internet means that networking and building an academic profile online are also challenging. All of this is compounded in Granma, where even publishing for the domestic market can present significant challenges. Resources for journals, research centres, printing and dissemination are limited and tend to be centred in Havana. As a consequence, those I am writing about here are unlikely to have a ‘right of reply’ through the opportunity to publish their own accounts of the phenomena discussed in a way which can reach the same audience.