HAVANA, Cuba, Jan 19 (ACN) Cuban professors and researchers will commemorate today the 60th anniversary of the day when Geography became a university degree course under the Higher Education Reform Law of 1962.
This decision rounded off a long process of academic institutionalization in Cuba and will be celebrated in a ceremony at the University of Havana’s Aula Magna (Main Lecture Hall), where the first graduates, university professors with more than 50, 40 and 30 years of work and representatives of institutions related to these studies, as well as professors and students engaged in the fight against COVID-19, will receive diplomas of recognition.
Directors of the main employer entities, such as the National Institutes of Territorial Planning and Urbanism and of Tropical Geography, the GEOCUBA Business Group and the Ministry of Agriculture, will be among the guests.
According to historians, the Geography degree course, made official on January 10, 1962, represented a revolutionary form of institutionalization which led to real quantitative and qualitative changes in the way this science was taught and learned.
The creation of the School of Geography of the University of Havana gave rise to a specialized science system eventually extended to all educational levels in Cuba with the support of the Institute of Geography (1962) and the Cuban Society of Geography (1989), among other NGOs and consultative entities.
In these sixty years, the School of Geography, the only one of its kind in Cuba, has graduated more than 2,000 students and hundreds of masters and doctors of science. Nowadays it has a faculty of 35 professors, 51% of whom are PhDs and full professors, 11% master’s degree holders and 37% bachelor’s degree holders who give postgraduate and other courses, a Master’s program in Geography, Land Management and Environment, and a PhD program in Geographic Sciences.
