A Cuban Day Care Activity

A Cuban Day Care Activity
June 1, 2013
Rosa Martinez

HAVANA TIMES — The start of the school year is a highly important moment
in Cuba. The country's public education system stands, next to
healthcare and sports, as one of the most significant achievements of
the Cuban revolution, and, every year, we attest to this on the first
Monday of the month of September, when kids return to the country's
schools or enroll in these institutions for the first time.

All schools in the country organize cultural activities in which
children, educators and families participate.

It has become tradition for the principal of the school to deliver a
speech that underscores the importance the school has as a forger of the
country's future workers, professionals and artists.

Usually, this speech has some of the political content we insist on
finding in all our daily experiences in Cuba, invariably touching on the
US blockade, imperialism and the revolution.

The address opens the school year officially, and the principal cannot
let pass an opportunity to stress that, despite the shortages the
country has suffered in the course of more than 50 years, no Cuban child
has been left without schooling, teachers or textbooks.

Though such statements are boring for us parents, who have heard them
countless times, we do understand and appreciate them. We begin to ask
ourselves, however, why no one speaks of the rise in juvenile violence,
or speak to children about their rights and parents about their duties.

The same thing happens at every start-of-the-school-year function, so
it's not something that catches me by surprise anymore. What I hadn't
expected, however, is for this old, tired story to repeat itself at an
activity held by my little girl's day care center.

In this case (it was May), the anniversary of the creation of Cuba's day
care centers was being celebrated. These are very important for women,
for they afford them the opportunity to fulfill their dreams of a career
and of professional development without neglecting the care of their
children.

It was a colorful activity in which the teachers dressed up as clowns
and performed dance and song numbers.

The kids enjoyed a show by a magician who, in addition to doing tricks,
told a beautiful story which kept them entertained from beginning to
end. I would be lying, however, if I said they enjoyed the beginning or
end of the activity itself.

The beginning was boring for the kids because, as in all official
ceremonies, it involved playing Cuba's national anthem. Though a few
children managed to mouth the words of the anthem, not one of them
showed any interest in singing that song, whose significance only the
parents and teachers were aware of.

Playing the national anthem is perhaps justified: it is one of the
symbols of our homeland and children ought to get to know it and learn
to respect it from the time they are little. But closing an activity
aimed at children under five with a boring speech, that's something
altogether different.

And that's what happened: the activity ended with a speech about the
commitment that Cuba and its revolution demand, a speech that included
quotations from Commander in Chief Fidel Castro. The parents struggled
to control their little ones who, bored by the high-sounding phrases,
began to run around, scream and play.

Every little kid in Cuba knows who Fidel is, but no kid there understood
what the kindergarten, the teachers, the plasticine, the colored
crayons, the horse on four wheels or the black doll had to do with the
homeland or the revolution. Most of them didn't know what the revolution
was or what it was good for.

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