By Alejandra Garcia on November 8, 2021 from Havana
photo; Bill Hackwell
Cuba dawns this morning with a long-awaited joy after a year and a half of pandemic and social estrangement. Finally hundreds of thousands of children, adolescents, and young people return to the classrooms to resume face-to-face teaching. For many, this November 8 seemed like forever in coming.
Two years ago, the Cuban government ordered the closure of schools and enforced remote education of students as part of the strict and necessary measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19. Today, 612,807 students from sixth to eleventh grade will return to the classrooms, while those from preschool to fifth grade will do so starting November 15.
I missed seeing from Monday to Friday the excitement of the children and the colorful feast of their blue, red, and mustard-colored uniforms as they hurriedly cross the streets to get to class on time.
The social distancing has been difficult for Cuban families, especially those who lost a loved one during this time to this silent and deadly disease. I can’t imagine how sad this time must have been for a schoolchild who had to go through that.
In my early childhood, in the 1990s and early 2000s, few things excited me as much as going back to school, especially after a long vacation period. I remember as if it were yesterday, trying on my uniform several times a day whenever the reunion date with friends and teachers approached. If someone had told me then that Cuba would go through extremely hard years like these, I would not have believed it.
This time has once again tested the creativity of the Cuban people. My closest friends who are parents became real circus performers to entertain and educate their children while the schools remained closed. They invented costumes and songs; and were parents, friends, and teachers within their homes’ walls and without leaving aside their work responsibilities.
And their children were pirates, cosmonauts, and each of their favorite animated characters, without ceasing to grow and learn. My friends made their children live, as Julio Cortázar described, “in that land of blue trees”. I can’t help but see in my friends the same juggling that my mother would have had to do amid a pandemic to entertain me since I was always a restless, curious and energetic child.
But no one replaces a teacher or a classroom. Schools are the space where each person’s first happy memories emerge, and it is where we make friends that could last a lifetime.
Like me my friends’ children tried on their uniforms several times and counted every pencil and notebook, and assembled and disassembled their backpacks over the weekend. Today they will go to school holding hands with their parents, who know they are safe from the virus thanks to Soberana and Abdala, the result of months of sacrifice by the Cuban scientific community and sleepless nights by the country’s leaders.
Strangely, the classrooms reopen at the beginning of November when it usually happens in September. However, the festive atmosphere is the same. Cuba breathes a sigh of relief. The return of children to classrooms is a powerful sign that life on the island is gradually returning to normal, moving forward together.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English