CHAPTER 19 Cuba’s Social Work Education Initiative

Cuba is a poor country of eleven million inhabitants. Yet it has trained 15,000 social workers in the last three years for work with at risk-children and ado-lescents, drug addicted youth, and other vulnerable groups, as the result of a recently introduced two-pronged social work education initiative (Pérez Montalvo, 2002). Cuba’s social work initiative began in 1998. Two social work training programs were established as a result of this initiative. One is an advanced, university-level social work education program for experienced social work practitioners (Barthelemy, 2004). The second is a one-year training program for young social work paraprofessionals at newly created schools of social work. Graduates of this program return to their communities of origin for work with at-risk individuals after they finish this training program. Cuba’s top political leadership supports these social work programs and considers that social work has an important role to play in addressing Cuba’s social ills (Alvarez, 2003). This social work initiative was a response to emergent social problems in the country and must be understood in the con-text of a larger program of the Cuban government known as “The Battle of Ideas ” (Barthelemy, 2004). The Battle of Ideas refers to the government’s effort to strengthen Cuba economically, socially and ideologically through the introduction of a variety of educational and social programs, including schools for the intensive training of social workers. All of these programs have as their goal to improve the lives of individuals from the most marginal-ized sectors of Cuban society, who have experienced the consequences of growing social inequality and alienation resulting from economic problem