Due to Cuba's current situation, pre-university students have been sent back to their home areas and now attend nearby elementary or middle schools, hampered by transport shortages and lack of specialized teachers. Author Fabiana del Valle recounts how her daughter, meant to study chemical formulas and equations, must sit in small desks with younger children in a rural school. The policy highlights disparities in educational access between urban and rural regions.
In a diary entry published by Havana Times on March 1, 2026, Fabiana del Valle details Cuba's escalating crisis impacting education. Blackouts multiply like biblical plagues, fuel shortages persist, and public transport is nearly absent, forcing boarding school students to return home. Officials assumed pre-university students would attend nearby centers, but transport scarcity makes even five-kilometer trips impossible.
As a 'brilliant solution,' authorities allow attendance at the nearest school, regardless of whether it is elementary or middle level. Del Valle depicts the absurd scene: pre-university teenagers squeezed into small, rickety desks, awaiting a specialized teacher who never arrives, while one instructor handles third through sixth grades simultaneously. 'My daughter should focus on chemical formulas, cells, and equations, but instead she must attend her small rural school,' writes the author.
The policy is not applied evenly: children in cities and towns continue classes and assessments at their regular centers. Del Valle questions whether this regresses rural areas toward illiteracy and stresses that education is a universal right. She fears her daughter's future is being dismantled 'piece by piece,' without basic opportunities or tools to navigate a world unforgiving of improvisation.
Officials introduce 'provisional measures' that, per Del Valle, often become permanent. Amid gasoline shortages—6,000 pesos per liter, about 12 USD—and bicycles emerging as status symbols, the educational regression alarms more than rising prices for rice or oil. 'I don't want my daughter to survive blackouts as if they were seasons of the year; I want her to truly learn science,' she concludes, resolute against an uncertain future.
