Back to the classroom

Cuban
Radar                                                                  Read Spanish Version

Back
to the classroom

A
Radio Progreso Alternativa Havana Bureau service 

On
Monday, September 3, over 3.3 million Cuban students began the
2007-08 school year. The figure includes
kindergarten to high school students. 

Universities
have also begun, with a registration of 700,000, a truly impressive
figure for a country with little more than 11 million people. 

The
total number of registered students at all levels indicates that 4
million Cubans are in the classrooms, a whopping 35.7% of the
population. 

Luis
Ignacio Gómez, Minister of Education, told reporters that all
the material base has been completed (classrooms, school furnishing,
books, writing materials, computing equipment, laboratories, TV sets,
video players), as well as other means that significantly improve the
possibilities of a well-rounded education. 

The
Cuban educational system, which is absolutely free from kindergarten
to postgraduate school, has over 300,000 teachers and a plethora of
equipment. At isolated places where the national power system has not
still arrived, computers and TV sets at schools are powered by solar
energy. 

Electoral
process
continues 

The
process for the nomination of candidates to Popular Power municipal
assemblies kicked off on Saturday, September 1. 

At
closing time,
204 candidates had been nominated in electoral district assemblies
with a total attendance of 28,500, or 86.1% of voters.

The
National Electoral Commission (CEN) announced that 27.9% of the
candidates are women and 15.7% are under 35 years of age.

Before
the beginning of the electoral process, the official newspaper Granma
on Friday, August 31, published that “Party membership is not
relevant, nor is sex, occupation, or religious belief in order to be
nominated as a candidate. Voters can even nominate themselves. The
nomination will depend on the people’s approval, for at every
assembly (there will be more than 50,600 of them) those nominated
will get the largest vote.” 

The
Catholic
Church and education 

Vitral,
a quarterly magazine published by the Catholic diocese of the western
Pinar del Río province, recently published its 80th issue. 

Found
in
this edition, the first after a restructuring process much
manipulated by international media, is an article in which the Church
requests access to education. In Cuba, education is exclusively
government-run. 

The
claim, together with others such as access to communication media and
greater flexibility in granting working visas to foreign priests, is
part of the historical agenda of discussion between Church
authorities and the Cuban government. 

Relations
between both parties seem to be in a process of detente after years
of difficulties. 

Cuba
and the International Pediatric Association 

National
Information Agency (AIN) reported that Cuba was elected as a member
of the International Pediatric Association’s Permanent Committee
for the triennial 2007-2010 in representation of Latin America.

According
to AIN, Dr. Fernando Domínguez Dieppa, president of the Cuban
Society of Pediatricians, has been appointed to the post. 

Dr.
Domínguez attended IPA’s 25th World Congress, which ended
this past weekend in Athens with the participation of over 6,000
specialists from 133 countries. 

Domínguez
declared that the designation is owed to the “achievements of Cuban
pediatricians that have permitted Cuba to reach, ahead of schedule,
the goals of the millennium in children’s health care, something
that for other nations is still a dream, or even an illusion.” 

A
Cuban prisons’
social program 

Trabajadores,
the Cuban labor federation’s official weekly, recently published a
report on a new program inside the island’s prisons. 

Under
the name “Mission Trust”, it will allow inmates that have good
behavior to study and work outside prison walls. 

“The
program is aimed at achieving deep changes in the educational
treatment of inmates through their incorporation to socially useful
work,” said Sara Rubio, head of the Mission Trust Department at the
Ministry of the Interior’s Direction of Penitentiaries. 

Rubio
said that there are already facilities under the “Mission Trust”
system in Havana, the central city of Santa Clara and the eastern
city of Holguín. “Inmates because of their behavior and
discipline have been chosen for studying and working in ‘open’
conditions in constructive areas such as health, education and
cultural facilities will be transferred to those prisons,” she
explained.

Knowing
the truth 

The
International Demonstrations on Behalf of the Cuban Five,
incarcerated in U.S. prisons, will begin on September 12. The Cuban
Five are Gerardo Hernández, René González,
Antonio Herrero, Fernando González and Ramón Labañino,
who infiltrated organizations in Miami dedicated to terrorist actions
against Cuba. For the “crime” of preventing attacks against their
country, they were condemned to sentences ranging from 15-years to
life. 

September
4 marked the 10th anniversary of the death of young Italian tourist
Fabio di Celmo, murdered by a bomb planted in the lobby of the
Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Meanwhile, Luis Posada Carriles, who
revealed to a New York Times reporter that he masterminded that and
other similar terrorist acts against Cuban tourist facilities, walks
freely through the streets of Miami. 

“Insisting
in the struggle to make that case known, that is the key, the one
that the Five are pointing at for us”, said Ricardo Alarcón,
president of the Cuban Parliament, during the Round Table TV program
broadcast on September 4. 

Alarcón
compared the performance of U.S. courts in other cases, where in
spite of abundant evidence of espionage that affected U.S. national
security, sentences were benign. He even mentioned the case of the
daughter of former President James Carter, who broke the law in the
1980’s at the time of the U.S. dirty war against Nicaragua.
Carter’s daughter occupied a campus facility in protest, was
arrested, tried and acquitted under the legal argument that her
intention was to prevent a greater evil, such as the death of
innocent people. 

In
the case of the Five, the same legal argument, documented by the
history of aggressions against the island, was dismissed by the
court, concluded Alarcón.