Beyond Classrooms and Books
HAVANA TIMES – Ever since my daughter started attending the Vocational boarding school, my money seems to have magical powers—what I work so hard to earn slips through my fingers without me even noticing. Every week, packs of cookies and a can of condensed milk are added to whatever else I can fit into my daughter’s suitcase. Food, hygiene products, shoes, and clean clothing are small sacrifices that pile up while prices rise like helium balloons and salaries shrink.
My girl is a 14-year-old student at the IPVCE Federico Engels in Pinar del Río. Her account reveals another side of reality, highlighting the precarious food situation at the school and the financial burden that falls on families to keep their children enrolled.
In Cuba, the system of boarding schools known as vocacionales was created to educate the country’s top students in an environment of high academic demand, discipline, and collective living. Since their inception, these schools have symbolized prestige and opportunity, but the island’s social and economic changes have turned the experience of living and studying at such schools into a real challenge.
“The food is always bad. We call the mincemeat ‘dog meat’ because of how disgusting it looks. The peas float in an ochre-colored liquid, and it’s common to find tiny white worms in the rice. My salvation is usually the chiviricos (fried casava) made by my aunt. Their crunchy texture is my weapon against the miserable cafeteria menu. I never go alone, so I share those pieces of home with my friend,” my daughter wrote.
Although these schools provide lodging and provisions for students, the quality of services has been declining over the years, with food being a constant point of criticism on social media.
“Sometimes I don’t even go to the cafeteria. I get by with what I bring from home and what I can buy at the MIPYME (small private business) inside the school. But by Saturday, there’s nothing left in the dorm, and hunger hits hard, so there’s no other choice but to go to the last refuge of the desperate.
“That day the long line snakes down the hallway, and my friend Daniela joked about the sumptuous delicacies that awaited us inside. The plate was a spectacle—no peas, no meat, just rice. Well, rice stir-fried with bugs that we picked out grain by grain. I opened the pack of chiviricos, shared half with Daniela, and crushed the rest into crumbs. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t think about the bugs and swallowed.”
These kinds of testimonies are not meant to evoke pity; the aim is to keep insisting in hopes that one day the relevant authorities will take positive action regarding the current state of boarding school education in Cuba. This isn’t new—I went through that same school in the early 2000s, and hunger was our classroom companion. Only now, like everything on this island, it’s worse.
“Surviving here isn’t just about the nostalgia of leaving your home, the friends you left behind, or the parties you miss. It’s the economy that slowly suffocates us, it’s realizing that every coin weighs more than the hunger, it’s feeling guilty for the sacrifice our parents make when all we’re doing is exercising a right—to study, to prepare for a future that looks more uncertain every day.”
Living in a boarding school means learning to cope with scarcity, homesickness, and the pressure not to fail, because every sacrifice—both from parents and students—is ever-present. It’s about resilience beyond knowledge or discipline, a resilience forged in the daily fight for a decent meal, in every family’s effort, and in the strength needed to grow up far from home without ceasing to be children.