Education on the island nation of Cuba is a clear example of how “a free education under communism will cost you.”
While in the half hour of The Round Table which is Cuba’s equivalent to The US School Board System they seem to only want to talk about the distribution of uniforms and repair of schools, yet the end of the course is approaching and there are other far more important details and subject matters that are a great deal more important, that should change regarding primary education which is grades 1 through 8 and which is not spoken. “But don’t you know?”, sarcastically jokes Alfonso, a worried father in the city of Santo Suarez. “My kid Alfonso, Jr is already in college!”, but the fact is that Alfonso, Jr. is only 9 years old and does not have to go to school for almost a month instead he awaits college level exam with no review or any type of proper preparation.
The communist island nation’s government have run out of materials and proper acceptable curriculum. All curriculum must be authorized by the communist party to make sure they are politicized.
The Cuban government have decided “They’re just going to give a test to children as young as 11 years old to pass them in to 9th grade placement. There is no test review. There is nothing. They’ve run out of content, material, of accepted communist party curriculum and zero educated teachers in children’s primary schooling.” This is what no one in Cuba understands. Not Yusy, nor Lucinda, Zunilda, Maylin, or Pedro, nor any of the other parents who were asked, why?
“In Luyanó this year the case of the “osico ” (which is not a Spanish word at all) was sounded and protested by the parents of all students that were educated by said teacher who gave this particular “osico” assignment. The scandal reached the entire municipality, “says Susel, another mother in the school Diez de Octubre. “
The teacher sent a paragraph with the word ‘Osico’ and expected as the assignment an entire paragraph using this nonexistent word. Dumbfounded, the parents went to complain about this nonsensical word and assignment. The teacher was prepared for this public outrage and even had a ridiculous absurd investigation on the subject of the word “osico,” he added.
According to the teacher, that word came from “bear” and therefore it was not nonsense. “The result of this absurdity was that one of the girl fell in an emotional crisis because she said that the teacher threatened that she was going to abduct and which implied torture, if she did not do the homework exactly as told,” said Susell mother of the girl. Another mother in the same classroom claims to have “a grammar and spelling book to contrast and disprove practically every lesson her child and all the kids in that particular classroom received.”
Another concerned mom said, “Every time the teacher makes a word, I’ll take pictures of the misspelled, made-up or fragmented sentence so that my daughter can take it with her to school, so that the teacher and my child might learn something, since education in Cuba is not something the government plans to provide my daughter. Nor is it there plan to educate anyone.” The mom further states that the teacher, “teaches nonsense like non-existent or misspelled words such as: ” haiga, semafaro, bad conjugations of verbs, venemos, tuallas, etc. too many to count.”
Furthermore, in all of the province of Havana there was an outcry over a Spanish test. Mainly, because the tests were ordered and coming as a mandate of the state, they are not done in the same school”, says Merlyn, mother of a sixth-grade girl in Old Havana. So, “They had the kids from eight in the morning until 12 o’clock noon without so much as even a mouthful of water. The parents cried abuse, they feel that all this abuse is because of a politically motivated communist regime abusing and exploiting the education process to radicalize these children on communist doctrine weeding out the children whose parents protest over those who don’t.
The parents that protest go on a list of antirevolutionaries demonstrating rebellious tendencies therefore the government weeds out their children disallowing the children of further education and lessening the cost of educating evenly and without discrimination. One parent added, “most of us parents of these primary school children, we protest in the privacy of our own homes, we don’t care about ‘revolutionary sacrifices’ or any sacrifices our ‘children must make for the greater good of the communist regime.’ All we care about is that our children who are still 11 years old in this case receive a proper education, ” the anonymous parent complains.
No one seems to understand the reason why the curriculum for children’s education in Cuba has to be directed by the communist party and therefore is outdated, limited and lacking in any profound subject matter or of any intelligent resource. The teachers are uneducated, underpaid with worthless CPC (The Cuban Peso), and are basically plucked from a communist loyalist pool trained not in academia but in policing children’s parents for their communist loyalties or lack thereof using our own children. Like one parent said “those officials do not know and what is worse they do not care to know what content or lack thereof is being taught in each school all they care is about weeding out the sympathizers from the non-sympathizers”.
Education in Cuba takes a period of “improvement”, the government once said. However, everyone assumed the improvement would be to add content and not to politicize the children. This is what, in a general way, the parents feel of various teachings to which one angry parent said, “instead of improving the school system in Cuba it grows weaker and weaker, they want to appear rigorous (…) but everything as far as free education and the illiteracy campaign in Cuba is a facade.” And, regarding the current status of the educational system.
A retired teacher who agreed to talk with a source in Cuba, said: “Cuban leaders have confused the word education with the word indoctrinate, I think there is a lot of superficiality in the education system. There is a lot of control and little content”.
Some teachers from the same school are paid by the parents in CUC currency (the monetary equivalent of the US dollar) in order to educate their children. When asked, a parent who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, why she paid the teacher in a socialist society that provides free education for everyone, she responded, “I pay the teacher so that she give my daughter the 4th grade educational content privately that she does not get at school.”
This is how fathers and mothers really perceive the education system in Cuba while the Communist School Board delights in their achievements, in “how well this school year has gone” or “in the notion that the school year has passed with no great scandal”. No one factors in the forced silence and the repression and oppression that buys them the silence of the parents who are forced to grit their teeth again and again at the lack of any kind of human rights not even for the children of Cuba. One parent said that, “There was no scandal about the school system – they are right- because no one was brave enough to protest or scandalize this issue. It’s among many of the injustices we must suffer in silence in Cuba. So, no it wasn’t met with outrage and protest because no one dare put a proper protest together.”
Another neighbor of “The Red Square”, said he was “scared” when he heard the municipal director of education in one of the many events held there say, “that the student who had not signed the commitment for YES (which means no redaction of the Constitution allowing more freedoms and elections in Cuba) should not appear in school because the child had no right to an education, we have again returned to the time when studies in Cuba were conditioned by political decisions.”
One parent said that, “2019 will be a dark year for education in Cuba,” and his comment points to “facts” that he himself does not want to speak of, but which he describes as “sad and miserable”, such as “the campaign for the YES for no redaction of The Cuban Constitution a campaign in elementary schools, as if they (the children) voted. ” He added, “My grandson himself was on the verge of being removed from school for not going to protest with posters to the street and he had fewer teaching hours than he needed in his second grade class because of this nationwide campaign that forced this little boy onto the street to protest a redaction of a constitution that the boy neither understood nor cared about.” The grandfather does not dare speak any further for fear of government retaliation nor would he mention who was responsible for the situation of education on the Island nation, a clear example of how free service charges an increasingly higher price for education cost the people of Cuban.
The enslavement of the people by the government and further adding to the grinding oppression the people must endure. It is further demonstration of the apathy of a communist system for its citizens. Their only concern is to continue their stranglehold on the necks of Cuban citizens. And, like everything else in Cuba, it’s all about political affiliation to the communist party for their continued manipulation, repression, oppression and systematic abuse of the people.
