By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Sep 2 1996 (IPS)

With the arrival of September and the start of a new school year, Cuba’s classrooms seem to have escaped the grip of the economic crisis that has battered Cuba since early this decade.

In spite of six years of shortages of all kinds, the Cuban government made good on its promise that it would not close any of the schools that form part of the educational system that has been functioning free of charge to its users for more than 30 years.

But besides the mere guarantee of classroom space for all, the 1996-97 school year is to be significantly superior to last year’s, according to Education Minister Luis Gomez.

“We have been working for several days, fixing up the school. For the first time in years, the government has assigned materials for the repairs, and the walls were painted,” said Orlando Liriano, a primary school teacher.

The school where Liriano teaches is a large old house in downtown Havana, one of the most densely inhabited areas of the capital. In the past few years, the teacher has even worried the roof would cave in.

“We are still lacking funds, but with a painted, clean and illuminated classroom, an appropriate setting for teaching is created,” said Liriano, who added that the walls had been a dark brown colour for years, because no other paint was available.

In spite of the persistence of the economic crisis, the government decided to earmark the funds necessary to start the year with the best possible conditions in the schools, where 2,174,000 students will study.

Sources at the Education Ministry said more than 2,000 schools were repaired for the present school year, at the cost of 18 million pesos and 100,000 dollars.

(The Cuban peso is on par with the dollar at the official rate, while the dollar is worth 23 pesos in the exchange bureaus. The existence of a dual economy means there are products and services that are only available in one currency or the other).

More than eight million notebooks, 2.5 million pencils and seven million copies of 18 new textbook titles will be distributed for the first semester.

“This is the most complete distribution of supplies we have seen in five years. Every student will receive the notebooks and pencils they need for starting classes,” Education Minister Gomez told the official weekly ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the publication of the Union of Young Communists.

Officials say more than 1.4 billion pesos of the budget were earmarked for education this year, an amount second only to that allocated to the social security system.

Luis Zuñiga, the representative of the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in Havana, said last Sunday that “the most important” thing is the equality of opportunities available to Cuba’s children.

Education here is mandatory up to ninth grade, and illiteracy is virtually nonexistent.

According to the National Office of Statistics, the population at the close of 1995 was 10.9 million, of which a mere 3.8 percent were illiterate.

At the close of the last school year, in July, the Education Ministry reported that 97.5 percent of six to 14-year-olds were registered in schools, while 95.4 percent of children under five were in preschool.

“Special attention will be dedicated this school year to secondary education, with the aim of improving quality,” Gomez recently said in a televised interview.

This year, secondary institutions are expected to have the greatest number of students, with 20,000 more than last year’s total of close to 703,000.

A document released in August by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) states that “the rates of secondary education are insufficient in almost all Latin American countries.”

According to ECLAC, up to 70 percent of teenagers are in high school in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, and less than 40 percent in Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Venezuela.

With 90.9 percent of 12 to 14-year-olds in school, the problem of education in Cuba is the allocation of funds to create better conditions and improve the quality of education.

The challenge takes on special characteristics because a significant number of Cuban high schools are in rural areas, where the students, both from urban settings and the countryside, live away from their families during the week, and combine their schooldays with agricultural work.

“We need 50,000 mattresses. The furniture in the schools has not be renewed in seven years. Refrigeration and the water pumps are also problems,” said the minister, who stressed that in spite of the progress made, the crisis is not yet a thing of the past.

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