Cuba has an excellent health system and an equally excellent education system tied to education with production. While its economy is based largely on the production and processing of sugar and its by-products, it has managed to contain unemployment through a variety of small productive enterprises and to meet most people's basic needs, ensuring good housing and other services for a large proportion of its population within what it has called work brigades based on housing collectives.

This was at least the situation when I visited the island some years ago as a guest of the Cuban Government, and as far as I know education continues to function on these lines. Its excellent health and education and training systems have produced a surplus of doctors that has enabled it to help improve health systems of several African countries, including more recently ours.

I was, some years ago, involved in a series of seminars on education with production held in a number of different African states promoted by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation of Sweden (which has, incidentally, invited me to a gathering in Uppsala Castle next week).

Cuba was invited to send representative educators to these seminars, and in return I was once invited to see its education and training systems at work.

At an early stage of the Cuban revolution, resources reportedly created each year by education with production through work and study alone, generated income equal to more than the entire revenue of the Batista government during any one year of its misrule.

I visited several schools, both in the countryside and in three cities, including Havana, at primary and secondary levels, as well as technical training institutions. The schools were engaged in citrus and coffee production on a grand scale.

If I recall correctly, the entire citrus and most of the coffee production of Cuba was undertaken in schools. This happened every day in schools, with one half of the pupils working in the morning and studying in the afternoon, while the other half worked in the afternoon and studied in the morning.

Technical training institutions were connected to the corresponding industries so that students were taught theory linked to small scale production in their learning centres as well as moving for half of the week to factories and farms for more intensive production.

Early childhood education was made available on an extensive scale making it possible for most mothers to engage in production. Even in early childhood, children were taught to do and make useful things for themselves and others.

According to Abel Prieto Morales and Max Figueroa Araujo ( the latter who attended some of the early seminars I conducted for the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation), the idea of combining study and work was one of the features of the educational thinking of Jose Marti, the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party.

Another historical source of the idea of study and work, Figueroa notes, is the classic works of Marxism on which Fidel Castro also drew after he came to power with the overthrow of the dictatorial Batista.

Figueroa notes further that the combination of study and work in Cuba has been organised in all forms and at all levels of education, through for example, the school vegetable gardens in primary education; the schools in the countryside schemes for general secondary day schools; the school in the countryside project in respect of general secondary boarding schools , within the context of agricultural development plans; a combination of specialised studies and productive work at the polytechnical institutions for technical and vocational training, teacher training institutions and higher education establishments.

"The application of the principle that study should be combined with work in all these forms and at all these levels of education is designed to achieve two important educational objectives: one relates to training; the other concerns productive work and social relations.

"The first objective concerns the development of awareness in the worker of his role as a producer of goods for the community and to create conditions which do away with prejudice surrounding the division between manual work and intellectual work. It represents an attempt to eradicate intellectualism from education and foster an interest in learning about the environment, applying the principle of a polytechnical approach in respect of all the subjects in the curriculum.

Fidel Castro's recent illness has raised questions about the survival of his policies which of course have been anathema to the followers of the oppressive Batista who emigrated to Florida and elsewhere in the US deep south (which was also the home of anti-black racism). Unless I am mistaken, most Cubans would not want to see the return of a US supported government of the rich.

One hopes that the recently reported discovery of oil off the Cuban coast will not lead to the undermining of Cuba's current policies.

Most of the students and teachers I met in different parts of Cuba were enthusiastically supportive of the productive work they undertook. The universalisation of education in Cuba and the raising of its levels for greater and greater numbers of students depends on widening and raising the quality of education and related work, in terms both of learning and productivity.

In this context, I would like to make reference to an article in The Botswana Gazette by Professor Richard Tabalawa which was supportive of Education with Production but felt that its cost might outweigh its educational usefulness. The Cuban experience has proven the economic value of work and study in reducing the cost to the state of education and training.

Even here, at one stage the Serowe Brigades alone had a revenue in one year of R 1 million in the currency of the time. The Swaneng Schools were largely built by student labour.