Social Work in Cuba

During Summer 2005, I was able to visit Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade. The Brigade has been visiting Cuba for 36 years in an effort to promote friendship between the Cuban people and the American people and also to fight against the economic blockade of Cuba as well as the laws that ban Americans from traveling to Cuba. Of the many themes and policies we learned about in Cuba, one was the state of social work there. Far from an extensive report on the issue, I wanted to share a basic understanding of the profession on the island.

Social workers in Cuba are considered as the “army of the healers of the soul,” a description which aptly describes all social workers and the work that we feel we need to do every day. Their mission in Cuba is basically to become friends of the local families and neighborhood people and utilize this close relationship to assess their needs. Creating this close familial relationship, which is indicative of the overall Latin-American culture, is done keeping in mind the need to respect boundaries. Social workers are expected not to wait for a client to come to them, but in the tradition of our community organizers, they go out and seek clients, block by block, meeting people, learning names and the issues they present, collecting figures and statistics and working to address those issues presented. Social Work education in Cuba right now consists of a 10-month training program and is not yet a Master’s program. They will have graduated close to 29,000 social workers by the end of this year and they all are organized into 1400 work brigades.

Cuban social workers pay special attention to children under 15, looking for nutritional problems and providing nutritional counseling and intervention. For example, children aged 0-15 are targeted for nutritional intervention. They are assessed, counseled, weighed, provided with a food plan if undernourished, and again, provided with nutritional education. They also target for intervention certain other specific population subsets, for example: schools for children who exhibit conduct/behavioral difficulties; people aged 16-29; the disabled, the aged, those in prison; truant children. As a matter of fact, the Cubans boast that they have social workers in every prison, whose purpose is to strengthen the link between families and jailed youth. In schools, their role is also to strengthen the family-school partnership. They report that 74% of the country’s youth population has been visited by social workers.

Currently, they have four (4) schools of social work in the country. They are developing their MSW and PhD programs right now in their University system, but in the meantime students study majors like Psychology and then enter this 10-month social work training program.

One gets the sense that the Cuban government values the work done by their army of the healers of soul and that they are very proud of their efforts to expand not only their work, but their education both within the current program and with the more professionally based Master’s and Doctoral programs being developed. The value placed on addressing the needs of its citizens via the intervention of social workers fit squarely within the framework that was expressed by other segments of civil society in Cuba — the betterment of society and of the condition of the people through responsive government and dedicated citizens.

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