By Jordana Hart, Globe Staff. Boston Globe 4/28/2000.
HAVANA - It is 9 o'clock in the morning when Judith Soto Lazo reaches the gate of the Grandes Alamedas day-care center in the capital's bustling Vedado neighborhood.
More than a dozen 2-year-olds catch sight of Soto from the courtyard, and tear from their games to greet her. The preschool teacher kneels to plant a kiss on each forehead.
Behind them, along Calle 25, scores of primary school students in red and white uniforms are being shepherded to a protest outside the Czech Embassy. ''Don't the students look lovely?'' Soto says as the toddlers press against the chain-link fence to stare at the sea of uniforms.
Like preschools and child-care centers everywhere, Cuba's ''circulos infantiles'' help working parents juggle their schedule while raising children. But child care here, more than in the United States, is tightly linked to the nationalized school system, so even children as young as 2 or 3 are
being prepared in a specific way for kindergarten and primary school.
At this center, drab and ill-equipped by US standards, those links include political instruction on the ideals of Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.
''There are dozens of activities like colors and shapes, conversation, recitation, poems, talk of [independence fighter Jose] Marti and patriotism, and about our country's social life,'' said Leonides Aguilar Dias, associate director for the center, which looks after 187 children from the age of
six months to 5 years.
Last week, 37 educators from Maine and Massachusetts spent a morning at the center as part of a one-week tour of Cuba's school system sponsored by a Maine group called Let Cuba Live. It supports lifting the US economic embargo and has brought groups of Americans, including organic farmers and
pediatricians, on visits to Cuba since 1996.
Karen Zimbrich, an education researcher with the Boston-based Institute for Community Inclusion, which advocates for students with special needs, traveled with the group. She said she noticed that the center attempts to begin instilling patriotic feelings in the 4- and 5-year olds.
''Their songs seem innocent enough, but certainly the themes of patriotism and nationalism are there,'' Zimbrich said. Still, she compared it to US children having to pledge allegiance to the flag every morning. ''I am not sure that I agree with nationalism as a goal and an end in itself.''
By all accounts, formal day care did not exist in Cuba before the revolution. Now, like the thousands of day-care centers that dot the island, Grandes Alamedas has its own full-time doctor and two nurses in the infirmary. Many centers even have a full-time dentist. Each center, open from 7 a.m.
to 6 p.m., has quick access to speech pathologists and child psychologists, said Aguilar. Teachers - four or five for each group of 30 children - come in Saturday mornings to help clean up and plan lessons for the next week.
Recently, as Castro has allowed more private businesses to operate, the government has licensed scores of day-care facilities in people's homes, where a provider charges anywhere from $5 to $20 a month. Aguilar said day-care centers like hers expect parents to help out with cleaning the school
and, if they can, provide books and other school supplies.
''Yes, I do help my school,'' said one of the parents, Nedia Alonso Correa, a tour guide, as she dropped off her 2-year-old son, Eduardo.
Aguilar acknowledges that her center largely caters to Cuba's elite - the children of well-off tourism workers, professionals and academics - who have access to US dollars and can afford to help. And waiting lists now exist at some centers.
The Maine and Massachusetts educators' group included a special education researcher from the University of Massachusetts, a Spanish teacher from Quincy High School, a ninth-grade world history teacher from West Newbury, and a teacher from a private school in Lincoln.
''As a teacher and a mother, I was impressed with how much parents seem to be involved,'' said Angela Check, the Quincy teacher.
Check, like others in the group, said she was also impressed, even surprised, that for the past decade all the early-childhood teachers in Cuba have had to be certified, and also that, unlike in the United States, child-care workers are paid the same salary as other teachers and have the same
social standing as primary and secondary teachers.
Members of the group were also surprised by the level of open affection that teachers show the children. Check said she noticed how frequently the word ''carino'' - affection - came up, even in formal presentations to the US educators at the center and at other schools she visited.
She said American teachers also obviously feel genuine affection for their students, ''but you would be hard-pressed to hear the word from a teacher or principal. We are almost trained not to talk that way.''
Parents pay tuition based on their income, Aguilar said, but it is no more than the equivalent of $2 per child per month.
To American eyes, Grandes Alamedas appears lacking in what characterizes a good US child-care center - chests full of toys, shelves sagging with books, games and art supplies, and classrooms plastered with colorful, oversized letters, numbers, and pictures. Here, there are very few books in the
classrooms, and photocopies of songs, poems and stories are stacked inside small cardboard boxes taped to the wall.
''I didn't see a crayon or paper anywhere,'' Check said. The lack of resources ''requires more recitation and more oral discussion of things.'' The Maine group, like others that have visited schools in Cuba, donated suitcases full of school supplies to the center.
''They made use of what they had,'' said Tamara Stafford, a former preschool teacher and early childhood researcher at the University of Maine in Orono. ''I think they showed you don't necessarily need all the fancy things.''
This story ran on page A02 of the Boston Globe on 4/28/2000.
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