Going to School in Cuba Has Become “Optional”

Blackouts and the lack of teachers are today’s reality

Several schools have reduced their hours and only offer classes in the mornings or from Monday to Thursday.

By Juan Diego Rodríguez (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – Dayma has not sent her daughter to school on Fridays in the municipality of Placetas, Villa Clara, where she is in third grade. According to 14ymedio, it is not because the girl is sick or because there is a new “complication,” but because the primary school itself has established that school days are only from Monday to Thursday.

She doesn’t know if the order came “from above,” but since the announcement, her life has turned upside down. “Every week I have to juggle to see who stays with her because if I stop working, we don’t eat. And at ten years old, I can’t leave her alone,” says the mother.

Hiring someone to pick her up from school and take care of her until she gets home from work is not an option either. The service is not cheap, and, with her daughter’s frequent outings at noon – when classes are suspended – it becomes more expensive.

On top of this, she argues, she works in the provincial capital, Santa Clara, which makes it difficult for her to take care of her daughter during working hours. Although she has tried to look for a job in Placetas, for now she cannot leave her only source of income.

Dayma confesses to this newspaper that she is “distraught” with the operation of the school: “I don’t know of any other programs, but my daughter barely has classes.”

According to the mother, the girl has not had a steady teacher since the school year began, and, due to the lack of staff, many subjects “have been left hanging.” “The other day I took her a little late because I had a medical shift, and when I got to the classroom there were only two children, of the 20 in the group. The parents had not sent the rest of them,” she says worriedly

In addition, the primary school has not had a director for at least two years. The teacher who held the position got sick and gives orders from her home, but she is never at the school “nor does she have the authority to demand anything if she herself does not go.” On several occasions, attempts have been made to “cover the gap,” says Dayma, but no other worker will step forward: “No one wants to get into that mess.”

“I know that things are difficult with the blackouts, lack of food and the situation of the teachers, who have their own problems. Sometimes I don’t want to send my daughter to school, because I feel it’s a waste of time and they only go hungry without doing any work. If things continue like this, they won’t learn anything,” she admits, and adds that even in Santa Clara many of her co-workers have complained about the same thing.

Carmen, a resident of the Luyanó neighborhood, in Havana, has a similar experience. Mother of a seventh-grade teenager, she has had to manage so that her son, at home, learns what they don’t teach him in school.

“At the beginning of the course they said that they would teach all day, but my son only goes in the mornings and often returns at ten or eleven saying that the teacher wasn’t there or that a shift was suspended,” she says. Other times, she points out, “they go in the morning and the teachers don’t come, so they leave them there for three hours, fulfilling a schedule, but without giving classes,” she complains.

Following the death of Jonathan Oliva, the 12-year-old boy who drowned during the floods last Monday in the capital, the schools of the municipality have tightened the measures, says Carmen. “Now they require the boys to also go in the afternoon, but they are not doing anything. In the end, without teachers and resources, they will not be able to maintain that system,” she predicts.

At the rate they’re going, the woman believes that only the most intelligent and “those with parents who force them to study” will be able to graduate. The most backward, she says, have no chance: “If they pass the year it’s because the school approved them so as not to have a bad record.”

Alarmed by the situation in the schools, both mothers agree that education on the island is far from demanding and controlled. “At any time you can meet a group of pre-university boys, or of any classroom , on the street. And it’s not that they ran away, but because they were released when classes were suspended,” Dayma criticizes.

If before these situations were only seen on days when the energy crisis forced the closure of schools and certain workplaces – as the Government did two weeks ago – now, the mother says, “it seems that education in Cuba is optional.”

Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.