His Revolution had not yet reached its first year and Fidel Castro, dressed in the same military suit that he wore for the rest of his life, spoke in front of the crowd that September 14, 1959: “Do you believe that the Revolution has already been made?” Education was one of the key premises of his social project: free, universal education, to make Cuba “the first territory free of illiteracy in Latin America.” During that speech, Castro asked the children again: "Do you want to be good revolutionaries? What is the first thing you have to do?... Ah, study. So, the child who does not study is not a good revolutionary."
The new Cuban Government democratized education, reduced illiteracy to 3.9%, formed contingents of teachers, took learning to the countryside, and Castro, as he did with the health sector, boasted that Cubans were, according to him, “the most cultured people in the world.” Certainly, the Revolution had guaranteed education, until the Revolution could not provide more. The last school year on the island, more than half a century after that speech, has begun with few teachers, little study material and mothers willing to stop sending their children to classes.
Paying for a haircut for the child for the first day of school in China would cost him, he says, 1,000 Cuban pesos (a little more than a dollar). “There is no economy that can sustain it,” says the mother by phone. The electricity has not reached the house in the Regla municipality, in Havana, for more than 30 hours, and he does not want to wake up his 9-year-old son so that he can go tired to start his fourth grade. "How was the soda and water going to cool him down? And to top it all off, without bread again in the bakery," he complains. “The hardest thing about this course is that the children have to go on an empty stomach and cannot sleep at night.”
La China – she asks to be called by her nickname – could list another list of calamities that she must face: she washes her clothes by hand without being able to connect the washing machine, and only when the water arrives; You have to get school uniforms for exorbitant prices (blouses and shirts between 1,000 and 2,000 pesos, skirts and shorts between 2,000 and 4,000); or watching your child, who suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, become upset when he doesn't have his medicine or can't watch TV or drink cold water. “Only one knows how heavy the soul is to see your own child go through work to be able to study in the midst of so many blackouts, shortages and needs,” he maintains. “Behind every notebook and hours of sleep stolen by heat and power outages, there is an exhausted mother.”
Even so, at the Camilo Cienfuegos primary school, in the province of Pinar del Río, many students woke up this Tuesday with a patriotic act that celebrated their return to the classrooms. Children reciting or dancing in front of parents and Communist Party officials, while the director welcomed them: “They said it couldn't be done and your presence here today confirms that it can be done,” she said in front of everyone. He was referring, without directly mentioning it, to Washington's economic siege. In the same country that has suffered at least seven total collapses of the National Electrical System this year, the Government has resorted to the usual rhetoric: the Communist Party described the return to school as “another act of heroism”, and the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel defended in
The start of the school year this September 1 could not be any other way, in a country that has been dragging on a years-long systemic crisis, to which has been added the oil siege and the multiple sanctions that the Donald Trump Administration imposed since the end of last January. People don't give more. The results of a recent study by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) show that extreme poverty amounts to 94% of the population; 68% of those surveyed declared a monthly income of less than 20,000 Cuban pesos (about 30 dollars) and 8 out of 10 Cubans stated that they have stopped eating breakfast, lunch or dinner, due to lack of money or food shortage. The figures come to life on the street: people begging, parents asking for help for their children, many on the verge of despair.
The Cuban Government even acknowledged days before returning to classes that schools would operate under “very difficult” conditions and “tremendous difficulties.” The Minister of Education, Naima Trujillo, said that it has been a challenge to meet the demand for uniforms of the almost 1.4 million Cuban students. "Without power there is no workshop that can function. Without fuel we cannot take the fabric from one place to another in the country. Without money and without import possibilities, fabrics do not enter either," he said.
The shortage of teachers has also been a problem, with which the Government has been dealing for years due to the professional exodus to other better-paid sectors, or the crack left by emigration in recent years. Trujillo reported that there is a shortage of 21,000 teachers, so teaching coverage currently reaches only 73%. In Havana they have had to relocate some 3,000 teachers from the east of the country, and other official figures speak of almost the same number of teachers missing in provinces such as Camagüey or Holguín. The low salaries (about 12 dollars a month) or the lack of transportation to move them have made some give up teaching.
Jessika's son (who has asked to be identified only by his first name) will be in 12th grade this year at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences, one of the flagship projects of the Revolution, a school to train elite students in Havana. Although, according to the mother, the center continues to guarantee the quality of teaching, it has been very difficult to keep her son hospitalized, with weekly passes. This year, the school will take a week to receive students due to lack of water. “Right now there is no water supply because the turbine is broken,” says the mother. She and other parents have also reported a shortage of 400 sleeping mattresses. The director of the institution demanded, for his part, that each student carry a rechargeable lamp. “So that they have lights at night so they can study, because Lenin suffers the same 20 and 22 hours of blackouts as the rest of the country,” says the mother.
There are days when Jessika feels like she can't take it anymore. He had to start “selling whatever appeared”, that is, croquettes, empanadas, making crafts. "Just today I bought him his school tennis shoes for 15,600 pesos (more than 22 dollars) and I still need all the toiletries he has to bring, and the socks, underwear and food. I honestly have days when they make me want to die, because I feel frustrated as a mother of not being able to give my son everything he needs, just the basics."
Sociologist Elaine Acosta González, researcher associated with the Cuban Research Institute, assured this newspaper that “the consequences of the current crisis and the worsening of life in Cuba are incalculable,” especially in recent months. “This is having serious effects on mental health, not only in children and adolescents, but also in the people they care for, mainly women,” he maintains. "There is a very high cost of daily stress, high levels of depression, students cannot respond to academic demands, changes in family routine, the atmosphere of concern they perceive at home, it is a set of problems that only aggravates the already existing care crisis for which the Cuban State has not offered a package of sustainable and reasonable measures that can adequately respond to the seriousness and urgency of the situation."
These days we have seen an entire black market in operation, taking on the role that the State cannot occupy right now: businesses in which all types of school supplies brought from abroad are sold at prices that are unattainable for many; others that offer to reprint their own school textbooks, which schools often cannot guarantee; mothers who have chosen to send their children in civilian clothes due to the lack of uniforms, and others who accept the fact that their children do not go to class. The Government can barely guarantee the well-being of Cubans anymore.
“It is one more manifestation of the structural crisis in which the existing political, economic and social model is mired,” says Díaz. "Faced with the withdrawal of the State, a good part of the services offered in the workplace have been commercialized. The provision of food, clothing and other issues that are required to receive an adequate education have been transferred to families. That promise of universalization as well as equity is being increasingly affected in the conditions of structural crisis that Cuban society is experiencing."
