Socialist revolution and early childhood: A critical document analysis of the reflections of Cuba’s socialist education model on preschool education

This article examines how Cuba’s socialist education model is reflected in early childhood education, focusing on the institutional Círculos Infantiles system and the non-institutional Educa a tu Hijo programme. Reading early childhood not as a natural, apolitical stage but as the earliest and least visible layer of ideological socialisation, the study asks how ideological orientations, pedagogical aims and processes of social reproduction are configured before formal schooling. Methodologically it employs critical document analysis of a corpus that foregrounds primary Cuban policy and curricular texts (Ministry of Education documents and the official preschool programme), primary pedagogical works, international organisation reports (UNESCO, UNICEF) and peer-reviewed scholarship, interpreted through the critical sociology of education, the sociology of childhood and liberatory pedagogy. Five themes emerged: access and equity as a public right; the ideological function of education and centralised structure; the teacher figure, labour and gender; educational outcomes, equity and structural costs; and the silent mechanisms of ideological continuity across family, school and everyday life. The article argues that, in the Cuban case, social reproduction operates as an immanent, constitutive function of early childhood education, whereas liberatory praxis—in the Freirean sense of dialogue and critical consciousness—remains a contingent possibility that the centralised, ideologically saturated structure at once invites and forecloses. Given its documentary basis, the study frames this emancipatory dimension as one projected in policy and curricular discourse rather than demonstrated as lived classroom practice.