Reporters Without Borders /
From your Cuba correspondent. By Oscar Espinosa Chepe (tel: 53 729-4645)
Education has not escaped the present crisis of values in Cuban society and
is rapidly deteriorating. The hard-won achievements of past decades are being
lost.
"The Cuban educational system, though long weighed down by ideological
bias and political indoctrination, has without a doubt offered the ordinary
citizen a level of education far higher than in most Third World countries. But
the crisis the island has been going through for more than 10 years is now
making the whole educational structure totter.
The education budget has been sharply reduced. In 1989, it was 1,664 million
pesos. Nine years later, it was down to 964 million, according to the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLA). Taking
population increase into account, this means the amount spent on educating each
person fell by nearly half -- from 152 pesos to 87 .
These spending cuts have affected working conditions and teachers are
struggling with dilapidated equipment and lack of supplies. They have also
reduced quality of teaching and the number of children with access to it.
Between the school years 1990-91 and 1998-99, enrolment dropped by 10.8 per
cent, mainly in pre-university, technical-professional and university schooling.
Even more striking is the fall in students graduating – 20.7 per cent
between 1990-91 and 1997-98 -- with the biggest drop (51.3 per cent) at
university level.
These gloomy figures are clearly linked to the wholesale desertion of the
classroom by teachers. In 1990-91, Cuba had 233,415 teachers. The number had
fallen to 197,568 by 1998-99. The main reasons for this, especially in middle
education, are salaries that are worth less and less, a huge increase in
extra-curricular tasks, many of them political, the poor working conditions and
the heavy weight of bureaucracy.
The situation is getting worse because young people can see the trouble
teachers have keeping their heads above water and are reluctant to enter the
profession. Despite political pressure in recent years to do so, fewer are
signing up for teaching training courses and fewer are completing them –
20,865 qualified as teachers in 1990-91 but only 6,020 in 1997-98.
To tackle the situation, the government increased teachers' salaries in
February 1999 under a complicated performance-related system. But a teacher with
a degree scoring the highest possible mark ("very good") – hard
to get because of the many requirements, some of them political – would get
a salary no more than the equivalent of $20 a month.
Such a meagre increase and the difficulty of getting it has therefore not
stemmed the flight from the profession. In Havana alone in the 1999-2000 school
year, 655 university students untrained in teaching, 1,286 officials of state
bodies and 1,190 partly-trained teachers had to be commandeered to make up for
the shortage. The same thing has happened in the current school year.
Audio-visual means have been used to try to fill the gap, but they cannot
replace the teachers, especially as they are basically used for political
indoctrination.
Apart from its structural problems, the education system is also a
reflection of the serious contradictions in Cuban society. These days,
better-off people are not those with better education but the privileged few
with access to dollars. And every Cuban knows the way to get hard currency is
not through education. Creative work -- the normal path to progress in any
society -- and the education that underpins it, have been replaced in Cuba by
time-serving and political patronage.
From your
Cuba correspondent / RSF | 