Fall 2007

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Student Life in Havana

by Viveca Ohm

Is the maple leaf really red? Do Canadians speak both French and English? And is it true some people have been attacked by bears?

These are some of the things Cuban students want to know about Canada. I’m with a group of educators who have signed on to teach English to students in the University of Havana’s Faculty of Foreign Languages. As it turns out, they already speak a very serviceable English, but they have lots of questions for us. It’s part of our three-week intensive cultural immersion with Vancouver-based Cuba Education Tours (www.cubavolunteer.com).

Like most buildings, the Faculty of Foreign Languages is a casualty of the neglected infrastructure of the Special Period after the Russian pull-out. The elevator has been broken so long that furniture has been placed in front of it. We climb four narrow flights of stairs to reach a dingy classroom. The walls are stained and bare, the blackboard cracked and some of the desks broken. But next door, resplendent and clean with a map of China on the wall, is a brand new computer lab donated by the People’s Republic of China.

The students are keen and hard-working. They major in at least two languages, choosing from English, French, German and Russian. The intensive five-year program, divided into components of pronunciation, grammar, reading, writing, translation and literature, requires them to maintain a 4-point grade average, but if they succeed, they can become teachers or translators.

Most of them hope to be translators. That way they can travel, they can work in the tourist industry, they can make more money than teachers. Teaching in Cuba is strictly a labour of love. Eric, a teacher in his 30s explains he earns 400 Cuban pesos a month (approximately $25) and his wife, a doctor, the same. They live in a free apartment above her clinic, but it’s still difficult to budget for things like shoes for their daughter.

We also meet Jimmy, a teacher in his 60s with a strong British accent. He came from Wolverhampton University on an exchange ten years ago and never went home. “The students are like sponges—a teacher’s dream,” he says with a grin.

There are foreigners among the students too, Koreans, Venezuelans, Brazilians. Free to foreigners and Cubans alike, Cuban post-secondary education is part of the revolution’s platform of sharing with the workers of the world, and it’s something Cuba can offer other countries in return for oil and much needed consumer goods.

After mornings working with older students, we spend afternoons teaching “yellow house” and “green tree” to children surprisingly eager to learn rudimentary English at the Casa del Nino y de la Nina (House of the Boy and Girl). This one-room after-school drop-in centre is the pride of a neighbourhood once considered a “dark area” because it housed a leprosarium, a cemetery, and what was then called an insane asylum. But after a fire razed the area, a brighter vision of what a neighbourhood could be was born. Rosita, an energetic senior who works with abuelos (grandparents) in the morning and children in the afternoon, explains that in this now-typical barrio, neighbours look out for each other and make sure no one is lonely or ill. They also elect representatives to deal with local issues, with the “presidente” of the whole barrio holding the equivalent of a full-time position paid in time release from regular work.

We visit a primary school in a heritage building festooned with banners congratulating Castro on his 80th birthday. With children from kindergarten to grade three, the school is also open to parents wanting to learn about nutrition or study music via television. While computers in private homes are illegal (even assuming private individuals could afford them) they have pride of place in schools, and Cuban kids take to them as eagerly as kids everywhere.

We walk through a training school for restoring buildings, a much-needed skill if Havana is to live up to its UNESCO World Heritage designation. Here teenagers can specialize in masonry, ironwork, carpentry and glasswork. Many graduates of the two-year training program stay on as teachers, and one of them shows us the stained glass window she has completed for the former convent next door.

Our tour guide is a teacher working on her master’s degree. A typical Cuban woman, vivacious and flirtatious, Marina is a single mom with two grown children. She calls us her “pigeons,” fusses over our safety, and proudly shows us her own school, another language institute on the leafy outskirts of Havana.

Like a great number of Habaneros, Marina suffers from asthma. Blame the smoke-belching old Buicks and the leaded-gas Ladas, not to mention the black clouds issuing from two oil refineries in the harbour, all of which combine with the extreme humidity to make Havana one of the most polluted cities in Latin America. But, puffing away on her inhaler, Marina is not to be deterred from her amibitions. Her evenings are full of courses to take and give, her days are spent shepherding tourists and those of us who don’t like to think of ourselves as mere tourists but as professionals investigating the culture and education of Castro’s mysterious island.

When we tip her the suggested 16 convertible pesos per person (about $2 a day in “tourist money”) at the end of our first week, we realize the draw of the tourist trade. With thirteen members in our group, we have just paid Marina over 200 convertible pesos, the equivalent of a year’s salary! Why bother with teaching? But Marina is proud; she wants to be a professional; she wants to make the most of her education.

She takes us to meet Nidia Gonzalez, president of the Cuban Teachers Association. An energetic woman still working at 70, Nidia explains that the literacy campaign of l961 initially guaranteed four years of schooling to every Cuban. Now it is nine years followed by vocational or pre-university training. Drop-outs always have a chance to get back in, and working adults have access to evening classes. A recent move toward smaller classes has meant a need for more teachers, and the increasing use of television as a teaching tool.

Asked about her philosophy of education, Nidia responds as a child of her time: To educate a revolutionary; a person with socialist values, a humanist who will defend the “patria,” believe in peace and be fully integrated into the community; a person like Che Guevara, she nods. And of course, José Marti, the Cuban poet and freedom fighter who predates Che by fifty years. “It’s difficult to find a Cuban who has never read Marti,” says Nidia, admitting that she herself is still moved to tears by his writing.

With one of the highest literacy rates in the Western Hemisphere, Cubans are not only an educated but also a cultured people. The biggest event during our time in Havana is the international book fair. Families, students and old people line up for hours, picnicking by the side of the road, for the chance to buy second-hand paperbacks. The crowd at the National Ballet tells a similar story. Young Cubans, who have paid a fraction of what the tourists are charged for their tickets to one of the frequent repertory performances (thanks to the double currency system), fill the Grand Theatre to cheer and applaud when one of their favourite dancers executes a particularly difficult jump or spin.

After the revolution, Castro took over the opulent Havana Country Club and turned it into the Superior Institute of Art. No one plays golf on the rolling greens anymore, but music students practise under the palm trees. Only the best and brightest get in here, the new generation of Cuban painters, sculptors, actors, dancers and writers. Will they be able to survive on the pittance that the government pays? Or is it easier to be a starving artist when doctors, lawyers and teachers get paid about the same as you do?

Life in Cuba is a daily struggle, but it helps not to be distracted by consumerism. There are no product advertisements on either radio or television. Flip on Cuban television and you’re likely to get a lecture on archeology, an artist’s bio, or a history segment from Cuba’s revolution or from the “anti-imperialist” struggles of other countries.

Billboards? Yes, and big ones too, but they all boil down to political exhortations to trust Castro’s smiling face and watch out for the sinister “El Plan Bush,” which would destroy everything Cuba stands for.

“We’re a bit insecure,” Marina tells us. “We know a change is coming, and we’re afraid it might change who we are.”