Maestra Voluntaria

Maestra voluntaria (Volunteer Teacher) imagines an answer to a critical question during the momentous first years after General Fulgencio Batista's removal from office in 1959: If the revolution is socialist, what does that mean to me?

Author Daura Olema produced this novel based on her journal written during teacher training for the 1961 Literacy Campaign. 

Casa de las Américas awarded its prize for best novel in 1962, and it was used as the basis for the 1963 film On days like these for the new Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). However, despite the evolution of testimonial writing to serve other Latin American revolutionary projects and to celebrate the achievements of the Cuban Revolution (including literacy and education), the novel was never reprinted.

For Hispanic Literature students, Maestra voluntaria is an opportunity to immerse themselves, as only literature allows, in a moment of great uncertainty in the midst of intense social and political change. It helps to answer the question: Why did the young people of the moment believe in the Revolution?

The novel's value lies in its expression of a possible world, as well as a tool to critically test the power of civic engagement, mass mobilization, and manipulation of populist discourse. It highlights the value of the combination of realistic documentation and literary conventions in the novel, since it serves as a window to aesthetic debates about committed literature, socialist realism, and the development of the testimonial genre.

This edition includes an introduction that describes the historical context of the struggle during the early sixties to define a Cuban revolutionary culture and offers a reading of the reception and possible approaches to the text, as well as a pertinent bibliography and a Pedagogical Dossier to stimulate the discussion about the novel.

The new edition of the book that plunges the reader into that year of uncertainty regarding the future of the Cuban Revolution: 1961. What to believe? Why?