Colonial educational policy in Cuba and the insurrection of institute professors in the second half of the XIX century

Abstract

This article presents a study of colonial educational policy in Cuba during the second half of the 19th century, focusing on the role of high school professors in the independence process. The Constitution of 1837 established special laws for the overseas provinces. In education, the formal promises of assimilation with the peninsula were never carried out, although they were applied in other branches of the administration. In this context, the break with the metropolis began and the Cuban national conscience began to form as well. In the stage of the Ten Years' War (1868-1878), sixty-five percent of the institute professors were accused of crimes of infidelity, separated from their chairs and some executed for collaborating with the insurgents. Also, numerous educational establishments were suppressed because, according to the Spanish authorities, they were places of insurrection where independence ideas were promoted. The 1868 insurrection in Cuba was interpreted, especially by the Spanish liberal elite, as a civil war, but in reality, it was a bourgeois revolution of national liberation.