Article and photos by Ashley Somwaru

Che Guevara, the iconic revolutionary who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, gazes sternly from beneath his military beret on the front of a battered three-peso note, which is worth about 11 cents in United States currency. On the back of the bill, Che has a different look: he is working in a sugarcane field, wearing a sombrero and a loose-fitting shirt. Beneath this portrait are the words “CHE—Precursor del trabajo voluntario,” “precursor of voluntary work.”

Che promoted voluntarism and a collective consciousness to influence the importance of agricultural labor and production. “I’m not interested in an economic transformation unless it’s accompanied by a socialist morality,” he once said.

This philosophy led to a cornerstone of Cuba’s education system: every student must do a compulsory 15 days of agricultural work. The idea is to keep young people connected to the land, as well as to inspire them to work in the long-troubled agricultural sector.

Recently, in the coffee fields of an agricultural cooperative in Viñales, Hedberto Padilla, a coffee specialist, explained how he gets rid of insects that can ruin crops, as high school students trailed behind, learning how to cultivate the crop and when the beans were ready for picking.

“We combine education with work; that’s a principle of the Cuban Government,” Padilla said, adding that the cooperative took a relaxed approach to the students who come to the farm. “If there is someone who doesn’t want to come, they don’t come.”

Evelio Diaz, owner of a casa particulare—a private home that rents out rooms—in Playa Larga who went to school in the ’80s, recalls working in many different fields picking mango, tobacco, coffee, plantain and oranges. “I did this for three years, Monday through Friday for three to four hours a day,” Diaz said, “It was for the future, to inform and inspire people to go into agriculture.”

A tour guide who asked that her name not be used said she went through the same program 15 years ago.

“It was part of your syllabus like something else you had to do; you had to go,” she said, and most students welcomed the time away from home. “Most of the kids enjoyed it because at night, there would be fires and parties and singing, and the local farmers would have local food for us. They would roast pigs for us because they were very grateful that we were there to help.”

Another social-service program inspired by Che and required of all college graduates, assigns students to jobs in which they may have no experience or interest.

Marc Frank, a journalist for Reuters who has lived in Cuba for decades and raised two children, recalled how his stepdaughter, who majored in marketing, was assigned to a government office, where part of her duties was to knock on doors and ask people to pay for their refrigerators. Frank said the program contributed to Cuba’s brain drain, because many young people left the country when they could. Frank’s daughter, with his encouragement, moved to Spain to follow her aspirations.

While Cuba may continue to change rapidly, the back-to-the-land program for students, a cohesive factor in Cuban culture since the revolution may well endure.