Francis abandoned his studies to become an IT technician to work at the bar-restaurant that his brother opened. Karina did not start pre-university studies in the rural area where she lives because she is four months pregnant. She decided to put her studies on hold, and does not know when she will resume them. For Marianlee, a recent medical graduate, pursuing a specialization in Pediatrics, which she dreamed of, is no longer part of her plan, which is now to leave the country.
The cases of these young women with whom DIARIO DE CUBA spoke jibe with the official data published recently. According to the report presented by the Government of Cuba for the 89th session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), in the 2022-2023 school year alone 21,738 students dropped out of educational institutions.
The authorities have recognized that the school dropout crisis mainly affects the technical and vocational education levels, and much of it is associated with early pregnancy (almost 19% in 2023 on the island), but there are other causes that prompt young people to drop out of school.
Dr. Ernesto Cordoví, who until recently served as director of the October 10th Gynecological and Obstetric Hospital in Havana, said in a post on his Facebook profile that since 2019 nearly 99,000 professionals in the sector, including 40,000 doctors, have left the National Health System. That number is probably not exaggerated considering data from the state's Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI): in 2022, there were 12,000 fewer doctors in the country.
Cordoví expressed regret that there is no policy to motivate professionals to stay and "young people, for fear of being regulated, do not study the specializations that institutions need the most right now."
"I don't know when I will leave this country, but until that time comes I prefer to be outside the Public Health system. Facing desperate situations on shifts where your hands are tied, and you can't help them, I've even gotten sick. No, between the lack of resources, the ordeal of transportation, the work itself, and the meager salary, it's not worth it," Marianlee said.
She and a friend who also did not continue with her studies, but who did not want to explain why, are working assisting the elderly through a non-state business licensed for this activity. Mileidis says that she is better off economically in family entrepreneurship. Karina, meanwhile, has the support of her mother in Cuba and her father, residing abroad, to deal with her pregnancy and raising her baby.
According to historian Dimas Castellanos, a member of the Academic Freedom Observatory, "early pregnancy is not a cause, but rather a consequence of social deterioration" and "the real causes of school abandonment lie in the totalitarian system, incapable of guaranteeing two basic conditions for the flourishing of education: the economy to sustain it, and the freedoms for its development."
"Ever since the first years of the revolution, a process of cultural and educational monopolization was set in motion: in December 1959, the Comprehensive Education Reform Law declared the State the only body with the legal capacity to create educational institutions. In June of 1961 the Law on the Nationalization of Education was promulgated, unnecessary because education in Cuba was not foreign. In that same month of June Fidel Castro pronounced his Words to the Intellectuals, with which he established the limits on freedom in his Cuba: 'within the Revolution everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.' In January of 1962, with the Law on the Reform of Higher Education, universities came under State control. In 1976 the Constitution defined the Communist Party as the ultimate leading force of society and the State, and established that education was a function reserved for the State. In this totalitarian process, incompatible with freedom, the citizen disappeared, which is a fundamental cause of the school dropout rates and the regression suffered in this social sphere," said Castellanos.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans decided to emigrate, thousands of students and teachers were driven from their studies, arrested and/or convicted for trying to exercise their freedom of expression, and the economic regression spawned the material and spiritual poverty that spurs students to drop out, he concludes.
"To the above are added other indisputable factors: one, today education is neither free nor of quality. The cost of snacks, shoes, uniforms and school supplies is impossible for most families to cover; two, schools work thanks to the increasingly limited contributions of family members who purchase fans, paint classrooms, and buy disinfectants to clean bathrooms; three, the poverty of even parents who acquired a level as professionals dissuades their children from studying; fourth, students avoid making any commitments to the State that might prevent them from emigrating," Castellanos added.
In the historian's opinion, "the Revolutionary work in education has done and is doing anthropological damage that will be very difficult to reverse without the elimination of totalitarianism; that is, without recovering citizens’ freedoms."
At the Cuban Observatory of Cultural Rights, Julio Llópiz-Casal stated that the reasons for Cuba's drop-out rates are fundamentally economic, but also of a moral nature.
"Many people underestimate the importance and value of studying, because Cuba is, increasingly, a society in which the benefits of conventional education are dubious. What is learned at a school is not practical for a young Cuban, because his survival, in terms of work, and his intellectual and social concerns, are not addressed by regular education. The quality of this education has decreased and continues to, due to the excessive ideologization imposed by the Communist Party and the growing material shortcomings."
Llópiz-Casal agreed with Castellanos that, for that situation to be turned around, "a change in the political system is essential."
"The widespread crisis that Cuba has been suffering for years is the product of the lack of institutional autonomy, the difficulty of working outside the State's outmoded structures, and the penalizations that since 1959 have accompanied any discrepancy with that stipulated by Castroism," he said.
In the words of the Cuban artist, the educational landscape in Cuba is "doctrinaire, reactionary, destructive and self-destructive. No young man respects or values such a thing, even if he fears it."