Reserved and unassuming, Hogan Shillingsworth looks an unlikely role model as he waits in oppressive heat to join dignitaries on a park rotunda in the outback NSW town of Bourke. When his turn arrives, Shillingsworth enters the rotunda to applause from a police superintendent and other town notables. It is a rare accolade for a three-year veteran of the NSW juvenile detention system, who faces another possible prison term while still only 21. How did Shillingsworth - on bail for "rowing and fighting" as he puts it - come to be sharing a platform with an assortment of VIPs, including a representative of the Prime Minister's Department and the Cuban ambassador?

Hogan comes from Enngonia, a remote settlement of fewer than 150 people, mostly Aboriginal, on the red-sand floodplain of the Warrego River, 97 kilometres north of Bourke. He and 40 other Aboriginal men and women are celebrating their graduation from a Cuban-designed adult literacy program called Yo Si Puedo, or Yes I Can. They are among the first Australians to learn to read and write through Yes I Can as it spreads campaign-style among marginalised and blighted Aboriginal communities along the Darling River system in north-west NSW.

Under Cuban guidance - in the form of adviser Lucy Nuñez, an exuberant 54-year-old grandmother from Havana - Aboriginal residents of Wilcannia, Bourke and Enngonia have been mobilised to go to classes through a "mass campaign" approach pioneered in the early years of the Cuban revolution. It will likely come to Brewarrina next year.

More than six million people speaking various languages in 28 countries have learnt to read and write through Yes I Can but it has never been attempted in Australia, where up to 65 per cent of Aboriginal people are "functionally illiterate" in English.

If early outcomes can be sustained, the initiative may be extended to Aboriginal populations across Australia, says its director Jack Beetson, who also heads the newly formed Literacy for Life Foundation which takes charge of the campaign this month.

A reference from Beetson helped persuade a magistrate to allow Shillingsworth bail, providing he attended literacy classes. Shillingsworth went further, completing one of the program's post-literacy classes, in art. His drawings decorate the graduation certificates and the foundation has employed him as an art-class instructor - his first real job.

Shillingsworth says the foundation's intervention was "the first time I ever got support from someone in court. The magistrate gave me a chance. She could see I was trying. I would have gone straight to jail otherwise."

Less than 5 per cent of young Australians are indigenous, yet they supply almost half the juvenile prison population. An Aborigine aged 10-17 is 16 times more likely than a non-indigenous youth to be under community-based supervision, and 28 times more likely to be in detention. The disproportion continues into adulthood: Aborigines account for 2.5 per cent of the adult population, but account for 26 per cent of all adult prisoners.

Illiteracy is a major cause of this imbalance, not least because it tends to prevent Aborigines from getting driver licences, a House of Representatives committee found when investigating over-representation of Aboriginal youth in the justice system. Many Aborigines cannot read well enough to do the online driving tests, the committee heard. As NSW Magistrate Margaret Quinn put it, "They might be the safest drivers of all, they just do not have a licence. Many of them may not be able to read or write." A succession of magistrates identified driving without a licence as one of the main pathways to prison, via fine default and further conviction for persistent offending.

This bleak scenario might have been scripted for 21-year-old Samuel Shillingsworth, who lives with his partner Brooke Edwards and their four-year-old son Sam on an Aboriginal reserve outside Enngonia township. They occupy one of 14 fibre cement-clad cottages arranged around the land council building, which functions as the Yes I Can classroom. Like his artist cousin Hogan, Samuel is entangled in the court system with heavy fines for unlicenced driving that will take 'a couple of years' to pay off, he thinks.

Samuel wasn't driving for fun: Enngonia has a pub, police station and primary school, but no supermarket, doctor, bank or Centrelink office. The nearest are in Bourke, 100 kilometres south along the Mitchell Highway. The only public transport to Bourke is a government-subsidised mini bus on fortnightly pension day. There are never enough seats and the bus won't take small children.

Samuel is about to graduate from Yes I Can and peers intently at a practice driver knowledge test on a computer screen. He hopes to start the process of getting a licence once he starts paying off his fines. "I did a couple of practice driving tests but they were too hard. I reckon it'll be easier now because I'll be able to read the questions and answer them properly," he says.

Getting a licence is not Samuel's main motivation for learning to read. "I got a little fella now. I want to help him learn as he grows up," he says. "Sammy likes books; he likes writing and drawing. Sometimes he'll come to me with a book and want me to read it to him."

Edwards, 20, comes to class for the same reason. "Little Samuel's starting to read," she says. "The other day he brung home two story books from school, The White Dragon and The Hungry Caterpillar. I can read them with him now - I couldn't do that before."

Enngonia Public School principal Melissa Harrison says Yes I Can has "promoted a positive learning environment in the school. More parents are talking to me about school and asking for their kids to be given homework. Our preschoolers are using the library more, too." Enngonia students range from teenagers to a 67-year-old ex-shearer. Local campaign co-ordinator, Mary Edwards, 33, went house-to-house asking families to come to class. Some neighbours were ashamed to admit they could not read and write, but agreed to take part once other family members signed up. "At the end of the program we had every person happy to stand up and read sentences aloud and write on the board," Mary says.

Yes I Can is winning broad support and forging alliances across political boundaries. The construction contractor Brookfield Multiplex has signed on as the founding corporate partner and the Literacy for Life Foundation logo is emblazoned on the Penrith Panthers rugby league team jersey.

The NSW Nationals' John Williams, member for Murray-Darling and party whip, likely became the first Coalition MP ever to praise socialist Cuba when he rose in the Legislative Assembly to "acknowledge the great work" done by Cuban ambassador Pedro Monzón, a regular visitor to Darling River Aboriginal communities, and complain that "Unfortunately, not enough credit has been given to the Cubans."

Monzón was a 13-year-old schoolboy in 1961 when Castro's new administration shut Cuba's education system for a year, sending urban students to spread literacy among the rural poor. The son of a Havana doctor, he was billeted with a peasant family in the Sierra Maestra, where he picked tobacco by day and taught the alphabet by night. "We lost a school year but we gained a fairer society and we grew up better human beings," says Monzon, pointing to UNESCO's declaration of Cuba as the only Latin American country to achieve 100 per cent adult illiteracy.

Another supporter is police superintendent Greg Moore, the Darling River Local Area Commander. He says Yes I Can has produced "tremendous outcomes among some of the most vulnerable people in our community". He is impressed that some graduates have gained enough confidence and skills to move away from crime and join a Police Aboriginal Consultative Committee where they "champion social-justice issues on behalf of less literate community members".

So how bad is illiteracy among indigenous Australians? The Core Skills Framework identifies five levels of literacy and numeracy performance. Level Three is held to be the "minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life", yet at least 40 per cent of Aborigines are estimated to rank at or below Level One. That dismal statistic helps to explain why Australia ranks below Cuba on some world literacy tables despite being 10 times richer on a per capita basis.

Jack Beetson, who once ran Sydney's Tranby Aboriginal College, says illiteracy among adult Aborigines is often the biggest barrier to job training, employment, better health and better-managed communities. "Literacy is a human right that traditional education has failed to deliver to these people. It's a huge step for most of them to even come to class," he says. Beetson, 57, a Ngemba man from Nyngan, remembers that in parts of western NSW, Aborigines were excluded from mainstream schools until the 1970s and then only got in if the local Parents & Citizens Association approved. "When I went to school I was in the D class for all the blackfellas and poor white kids. I wanted to study history but was told, 'That's not for you, son.' "

A generation or two ago, illiterate Aboriginal men in the far west might have found work mustering sheep and cattle, maintaining rail track, or slicing and boning at a local abattoir. Declining pastoral industries, closures of meat works and the loss of rail links to the east eliminated jobs for the uneducated, reducing most Aboriginal families to semi-permanent dependence on welfare. With that came a rise in the by-products of powerlessness: chronic illness, substance abuse, and community and domestic violence.

Beetson believes the Cuban approach to learning can work where traditional education has failed many Aboriginal populations, because it makes illiteracy the responsibility of an entire community rather than an individual problem. "We aim to build a community culture that values and supports learning," he says.

The Yes I Can campaign unfolds in three phases. In Phase One the foundation teams up with a locally accepted organisation, typically a land council, and employs respected locals as organisers and class facilitators. There is a long period of talking and listening aimed at getting whole families to sign up.

"You have to build trust and respect before you can do anything with our people. The Cuban program has done that," says Lillian Lucas, who co-ordinates the Bourke arm of the scheme. Some of its 27 graduates live at Alice Edwards Village, where Lucas grew up, a squalid former reserve on the Darling River outside the town levee. "There is a lot of negativity here, our community is broken," says Lucas, 37, as she drives around the village with its decaying dwellings and overgrown yards studded with wrecked vehicles. "But we are getting results with kids who have come out of high school but can't read and write."

Phase Two is the literacy class based on a set of 64 one-hour lessons on DVD. Each lesson shows a class of non-literate learners - played by English-speaking actors from Grenada - being taught by an experienced teacher. Class facilitators help students do oral and written exercises being modelled on screen.

Words and phrases are broken down into component sounds and letters and then re-assembled. Each letter is associated with a number, on the assumption that most people of low literacy have some familiarity with numbers. Associate Professor Bob Boughton, an adult education expert at the University of New England, which helps manage the literacy campaign, says students tend to identify with the black Grenadian actors and gain confidence from knowing their own community is part of a global campaign.

Boughton advised the East Timor government when Cuba developed and ran a literacy campaign in the newly independent nation. "Over 120,000 adult Timorese gained basic literacy within four years from 2007 to 2011, in conditions of extreme poverty and despite political upheaval," he says.

Phase Three of Yes I Can is a range of post-literacy activities that include computing, healthy cooking from recipes, art and reading to children. These are designed to consolidate learning and build pathways into jobs, further education and community participation.

Every Sunday, an extended family gathers in Havana. They come for a telephone call from their mother and grandmother Lucy Nuñez, an Afro-Cuban who has spent the past 10 months helping Aboriginal staff to run Yes I Can. One of thousands of Cubans working abroad in education and health care, Nuñez was unprepared for the isolation of being the only Cuban posted to the outback. "When I arrived in Wilcannia I cried for a week," she says. "I felt very sad because I was alone. I still miss my family very much, and also the smell of the sea."

Nuñez, who has worked among Maoris in rural New Zealand, was unprepared for the social disintegration she encountered. "I learnt about how Aboriginal people suffered from colonisation, how they have been separated from their families, moved out of towns and put on reserves. Their communities are broken, they have addictions and no jobs. Life is very hard," she says. Obviously popular - she has a sheaf of thank-you letters from students - Nuñez believes her skin colour and a shared experience of colonisation helped her win the trust of sceptical communities. "They say, 'You are black, we think the same'. They tell me black people think with their hearts and white people think with their brains. I tell them if you want respect you have to increase your knowledge."

Enngonia mother Betty-Anne Edwards hoped to graduate from Yes I Can with her sons Justin, 21, and David, 23. Justin, who quit school in year 7 but now aims to do a course and get a forklift ticket, joins her on the rotunda in Bourke's Central Park but David has disappeared after "getting into trouble with the law."

"David was doing really well, he only had nine lessons to go to out of 64," says Betty-Anne. "It was keeping him off the alcohol and he was a lot calmer. He used to wake me up early to go to class."

She is definite about her own newly literate future: "I want to study everything now, whatever they throw my way."