Cuba Opens Schools With No Buses, Few Teachers

Cuba reopened more than 10,000 schools on Tuesday for an estimated 1.4 million children and over 135,000 teachers — with school buses grounded by a fuel shortage, uniforms unavailable and more than a quarter of teaching posts empty.

Education Minister Naima Trujillo Barreto called the reopening a "heroic act," according to the Associated Press.

Nationwide teacher coverage has fallen to 73%. Uniforms met just 12% of demand at the primary level. Many families face daily power cuts of more than 20 hours.

What families are facing

In Las Minas, the Barroso family rose at dawn and hitched a wooden cart to a borrowed horse to get one daughter to class, because the school buses are no longer running. Thieves recently stole the family's own horse and killed it for meat, the AP reported.

"This academic year has been the most disastrous one," said Leanete Barroso, a mother of two daughters.

Yurima Izaguirre, a mother of three, could not find new uniforms for her two daughters and could not afford new shoes after a surge in prices. For the first time, she had to buy school supplies herself because the government could not provide them.

She also has to pack lunch every school day — another first for Cuban parents — and settled on what the family could afford: pasta, tuna and mayonnaise. "It has to last," she said.

Her children carry small rechargeable fans labeled with their names to survive classrooms where temperatures run above 90 degrees. With outages topping 20 hours a day, the family charges the fans at a neighbor's house.

Why the teachers are gone

Officials blame the vacancies on low salaries and emigration. To cover Havana, the government deployed more than 3,000 teachers from Cuba's eastern provinces.

"Everyone is invited — anyone who has something to contribute," Trujillo Barreto said. "You might be at home, perhaps retired, and eager to meet a group of children who need lessons in the very subject you know better than anyone else."

On uniforms, she was blunt: "No workshop can operate without electricity. Without fuel, we cannot transport fabric from one part of the country to another. Without money or the ability to import, no fabric comes in either."

Students may wear "comfortable clothing" this year, she said, but are still required to tie on the traditional red and blue kerchiefs.