EDUCATION-CUBA: More than 770 Refurbished Primary Schools

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 3 2002 (IPS) - More than 770 primary schools have been refurbished or built in the Cuban capital over the past year and a half as part of a government programme aimed at improving the educational system.

“Havana practically came to a halt to finish the work on the schools,” Misael Díaz, a resident of Old Havana, told IPS. “Whole blocks have even been cut off in the past few days, to let the machines and workers do their job.”

Work on the schools began in 2001. But last June, 344 schools were still in need of remodeling, and 33 new schools had yet to be built. Since then, an average of 40,000 construction workers and volunteers have been busy working on the schools every day.

The target is to reduce the average number of children per classroom to 20 – the main goal of a campaign that according to President Fidel Castro will put Cuba “far ahead of other countries” in terms of the quality of primary school education.

World Bank statistics indicate that one out of five children worldwide do not attend school, millions of students drop out of school without even learning to read, and 88 countries will be unable to provide primary education to all of their school-age children in 2015.

The government statistics office reports that in Cuba, a country of 11.2 million, there are 2.3 million primary, secondary, technical-vocational and university students registered in the educational system.

But in this socialist island nation, where education is free of cost and compulsory through the ninth grade, the main problem since the 1960s is not one of coverage and enrollment but of quality.

The programme to upgrade the educational system has included repairs and reconditioning of schools, the installation of audiovisual equipment in classrooms, and the opening of a computer lab in every school.

Castro reported on Aug 30 that the total cost of the works that got underway last year ran to 25.8 million dollars in hard currency and 215.8 million pesos (on par with the dollar for official business, although dollars sell at 27 to the peso in the government exchange houses).

In his speech announcing the completion of the work to prepare the schools for the start of the 2002-2003 school year, the president estimated the value of the remodeled or newly built schools at two billion dollars. But, he added, “the social and human value is immeasurable.”

The expense came at a time of great difficulty for the Cuban economy, due to the plummeting of the prices of the country’s main export commodities – like sugar and nickel – the slump in global tourism in the wake of the Sep 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, and the suspension of oil imports from Venezuela.

There are no private schools since Cuba’s educational system was nationalised in 1961, two years after the 1959 triumph of Castro’s revolution.

The educational system has been hit hard by the economic crisis that broke out in the early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and east European socialist bloc, this country’s main trading partners, which accounted for 85 percent of its trade, tipped Cuba into a crisis from which it has not yet pulled out, more than a decade later.

The situation hit bottom in the first half of the 1990s. While Cubans dealt with scarcity of food and other basic items, schools became rundown due to lack of maintenance, many students had no pencils, notebooks or textbooks, and a number of teachers turned to other livelihoods because of the dismally low wages.

Despite everything, schools were not closed and personnel was not laid off. On the contrary, educators were the first to benefit when the government decided in the late 1990s to slightly increase salaries in some sectors.

Depending on their performance, “teachers can increase their salaries by 10 pesos,” said Education Minister Luis Ignacio Gómez. The salaries of teachers start at 198 pesos a month.

The budget funds earmarked for education diminished substantially – 48 percent – in real terms between 1989 and 1995, according to a study on the Cuban economy by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a United Nations regional agency.

But the education budget began to recover in 1996. The government statistics office, which answers to the Ministry of Economy and Planning, reported that spending on education represented 8.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product last year.

To staff the new schools, teaching courses were expanded, and a number of brand-new teachers are starting the school year with virtually no experience whatsoever.

“I would have liked to study plastic arts, but when I finished high school my grades weren’t that good, and I had to opt for the school for new teachers,” a 16-year-old young man from Havana, who has already taught a few classes, told IPS.

The shortage of teachers that has made it difficult to guarantee universal coverage has been one of the biggest challenges facing the Cuban government, and one of the loudest complaints of the population, since the educational system was nationalised.

“Here anyone can stand in front of a classroom to teach,” complained Mariela Gómez, who has been a teacher for 16 years. “Sometimes the teacher is almost as young as the kids she’s teaching, and educators do not always have the cultural level they should have.”

“When I began, I almost went crazy. I was very young, and I had to deal with a classroom full of 65 primary school students,” said Gómez.

A study released in 1998 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) concluded that Cuba’s indicators put it far above the Latin American average in terms of quality of education.

The study focused on 56,000 students from 13 countries in the region. “In all of the countries, private education outstrips the quality of public education, but there is one public education system that outdoes all the others,” UNESCO expert Juan Casassús said at the time, referring to Cuba.

Nevertheless, many Cubans are dissatisfied. “I was born with the right to an education. For me it is the most normal thing in the world for all children to go to school. But I want more than that,” said Raquel Pérez, a 39-year-old researcher.

The “more” that Pérez was referring to is for her seven-year- old to gain not only a solid foundation in basic subjects like Spanish, math and history, but to “truly” learn English and how to use a computer.

“I studied English for six years in secondary school and prep school, but the curriculum just repeated itself year after year, and I never had a good teacher. When I entered the university I could hardly say ‘good morning’ in English,” said Pérez.