Kids Washing Bottles Instead of Going to Class
The beginning of the school year for many students in Havana
Cuba revives Castro’s “countryside school” for 15 days for three grades that have not yet received their school materials.
By Juan Diego Rodriguez (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – Not all Cuban children started classes this Monday, when the 2024-2025 school year has been inaugurated with great fanfare. In Havana, for the next 15 days, some of them will have to work, either in cleaning, or in gardening, or even in other tasks, in a new kind of “school in the countryside,” one of Fidel Castro’s educational projects abandoned with the arrival to power of his brother Raul, in 2008.
Tomorrow, for example, in a high school south of the capital, eighth grade students will have to go to a private cleaning-products company “to scrub bottles.” “Why does the school send some children to go clean for some rich people?” asked Daisy, who lives in Regla.
Daisy’s two children are in high school in the municipality of Regla, and today they began the course “incorporated” in the first destination of the “school in the countryside.”
The general director of Education of Havana, Karenia Marrero Arrechea, had already warned, although without giving details, last week on State TV’s Round Table program, when referring to the “change that we have to achieve in the student” to “link study and work.” “We are starting a school in a different field, where the student feels linked to tasks of impact,” she said, specifying that they would “begin” with three grades: eighth, eleventh and the first of Technical and Professional Education (ETP), in “organoponics” in the corresponding municipality and “on plaques and monuments.”
The phrase evoked by the official still causes chills in the generation of many parents who accompanied their children today on the first day of the school year, and who were sent in the eighties to the fields of tobacco, cabbage, banana, garlic, beans and coffee crops, in Pinar del Río or what are now the provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque.
“I still have scars from that experience,” recalls María, a 45-year-old from Havana. “I had chronic conjunctivitis; they sent me to the infirmary, and the doctor left us locked up from the outside because he went to a party. They had to pass us food through the windows. I left there apparently recovered, but on the first day back in the field I realized that I couldn’t look at the areas illuminated by the sun.”
When she told the man in charge of the agricultural work what was happening to her, he thought she was lying to evade work. “I had to continue weeding in the furrows for two more weeks. When I returned home my eyes were blurry, and I could no longer look at any white or light-gray objects. I was diagnosed with advanced keratitis, an infection of the cornea. I almost lost vision in both eyes, and it still bothers me to look at any light-colored surface.”
The objective of the so-called “country school,”which was chronologically followed by the “school in the countryside,” was none other than to indoctrinate the students, called to become a “productive force.” Established in the seventies, the first such school was for high school students – seventh, eighth and ninth grade – who had to leave the cities to do agricultural work for a period of 45 days. Later, with the crisis, the “program” was reduced to 30 days and only for teenagers from Havana. The second program was for pre-university scholarship holders, in which a half-day was spent in study and the other half in working in the field.
Why are they now resurrecting these projects, whose eradication was precisely one of the most applauded measures of Raulism? The authorities have not explained it, nor did the teachers in the presentation this Monday, and the parents can only guess. “It seems that it’s due to the problem of school supplies, because coincidentally the children who are being sent to those jobs have not been given the materials,” says Ernesto, with suspicion. He is the father of girls in the same high school as Daisy’s children. “My oldest daughter, who is in eighth grade, doesn’t want to go. She thought it was something voluntary.”
The families are extremely upset, because they have spent a lot of money on uniforms and other school supplies, and now they being asked to supply “adequate clothes” for the work.
Moreover, the state of that school – whose name is reserved for fear of reprisals – is painful, they say. “The teachers themselves warned us that they don’t have the equipment for the computer class, that part of the classes have to be given in another secondary school, and, in addition, they don’t have tables or chairs; everything is broken or dilapidated, even Fidel’s portraits,” says Ernesto. “I myself studied here thirty years ago, and today it looks like another planet.”
Other educational centers in the capital present the same panorama. In the José Miguel Pérez Pre-University, in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución, they had not even bothered to give a coat of paint to the facade. The wall looked as unpainted as the gigantic flag that heads the morning assembly, and the hubbub was less than other years. It is clear, at a glance, that there is a reduction in the number of students who intend to study a career, another piece of data that the government ignores. The group of teenagers between 14 and 17 years old deployed in the courtyard had to endure the military voice of the director through the bullhorn.
Outside Havana, the situation is even worse. In San Juan and Martínez, Pinar del Río, little has changed since the passage of Hurricane Ian, which destroyed much of the municipal infrastructure two years ago. “Two years after the cyclone and nothing,” a local resident, whose children go to Modesto Gómez Rubio school, tells this newspaper. This one finally has a roof, “but no bathroom,” and it is still “without electricity, without a floor, without anything worthy of the children,” the same source continues. Next to the dilapidated school building, an outhouse leans precariously serving as a bathroom.
“These are the classrooms in which the children of the tobacco mecca are going to start their school year,” the woman says sarcastically, referring to the municipality, cradle of the most precious tobacco that, however, does not see all the capital that is collected in exports and auctions of Cuban cigars going to better classrooms for their children.
None of this is reflected in the front pages of the official press, which proclaims that “Cuba is celebrating” the return to the classrooms. In those images, there are no schools with cracks in the walls, but well painted ones; there are no malnourished students but ones who are proud and smiling, even posing for selfies taken with their cell phones.
Again, the intention to recover one of the traditional crown jewels of Castro’s propaganda is flagrant. This is clear from the words of the Minister of Education, Naima Ariatne Trujillo, who this Monday was one of the authorities who headed the main act of the beginning of the school year in Santa Clara, and who on national television emphasized the “special fact that our educational system is universal, free.”
A single glipse of realism is observed in the provincial newspapers, specifically in El Artemiseño, which uses an infographic to show the deficit of teachers – 1,845 are missing, 24.3% of the necessary total – and, above all, its main cause: emigration.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.