Havana, Nov 17 (Prensa Latina) The priority Cuba gives to educational policy allows to place the country today with the highest rate of education development in the region, Education Minister Ena Elsa Velazquez said.
During a meeting with the press, the minister stressed that this nation has a literacy rate of 99.8 percent, and the highest education in the region is of 99.7 percent of students in classrooms.

Cuba has devoted about 12.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product to the educational system, showing the importance given here to this sector, she noted.

According to the 2013-2014 Education for All Global Monitoring Report by UNESCO, these achievements place the island as the country of Latin America and the Caribbean with highest rate in the development of education and among first 15 worldwide ranking in this indicator as very high.

Velazquez stated that this position is supported by results as the educational level of 12.6 degrees in the employed population with 15 or more years old and having first in the quality of learning in the region. Among the main social transformations occurred in Cuba after the revolutionary triumph in 1959 are the changes in education, she said.

She also recalled that illiteracy, as a social phenomenon, was eradicated in Cuba through a national campaign conducted in 1961. This process was complemented by the universal primary education, and the battle for the sixth and ninth grade for the new people who learned how to read and write, and then to reach 12th grade, she added.

The improvement of curricula, a task that now the ministry engages in order to raise the quality of education and adapt it to the current time in Cuba and the world, was also boosted parallel to this project, said the official.