From The Council on Foreign Relations

Make Believe About Education in Cuba
 By Elliott Abrams
“Cuba has an extraordinary resource – a system of education which values every boy and every girl.”

This is a remarkable statement to make about a communist dictatorship. It is disturbing and disappointing to find it coming from a high official of the Obama administration–Valerie Jarrett.

Does Castro’s Cuba value every boy and girl who wants freedom and wishes to denounce the one-party dictatorship?

Does it value every boy and girl whose parents are political prisoners?

Does it value every boy and girl who wants to read freely about liberty and democracy, not just the Marxist clap-trap prescribed by the Party?

As a Brookings Institution study of education in post-Communist societies put it,

Communist societies such as Cuba consider ideas weapons in the class struggle. They stress the function of education in facilitating political indoctrination of the population…. Countries such as Cuba have had total command of education and have used it to indoctrinate children in schools. The system also controls mass media by creating a monopoly on the information and interpretations Cubans use to make sense of their social world.

The Castro regime has indeed invested heavily in the educational system, and that is perhaps what Ms. Jarrett meant to communicate. But that is not what she tweeted. Instead her words suggest blindness to what is taught in those schools. Surely closing minds, surely Party indoctrination, do not “value” the children of Cuba–except, as the Brookings study put it, as “weapons in the class struggle.”