This list of songs come from a teacher-training manual that Ernesto Chávez carried like a socialist Bible when he served for four years as a maestro voluntario [volunteer teacher] in the mountains of El Escambray and Oriente province (1960-1964). Now part of a rich personal archive Ernesto donated to UF, the deliberately politicized titles, and lyrics of the songs speak to the militarized fusion of ideological indoctrination (then openly called adoctrinamiento) and academic instruction that teachers like Ernesto and their peasant pupils were supposed to absorb. Ernesto numbered among the very first graduates of Minas del Frío, a Marxist training camp where teenagers began their four-to-five-year commitment to going and doing—echoing Fidel Castro’s command, “donde sea, para lo que sea”—whatever the Revolution asked of them. On New Year’s Day 1960, Fidel Castro had personally promoted the plan by leading dozens of kids on a pilgrimage up Pico Turquino, Cuba’s tallest mountain, an imitation of his own actions as guerrilla commander in the two-year war against the forces of Fulgencio Batista. This fused the political nature of the maestro voluntarios’ role as agents of both a soon-to-be Communist state and the incontestability of Fidel Castro’s rule. Ernesto Chávez Collection, University of Florida.
