14ymedio.com

Julio Mojena, the father of twins residing in the Havana neighborhood of Cerro, considers the restrictions arbitrary since there is no written rule that specifically states them. His sons dyed their hair in August and now, he laments, “they can’t go to class until they get haircuts… In my time it was the length of the hair and the earrings, now it’s the color. What will it be tomorrow?” he asks.

“Each school can make adjustments to school regulations” depending “on the characteristics of their community,” a Ministry of Education official, who prefers to remain anonymous, told 14ymedio by phone.

Although there is no specific regulation on hair color, nails or any other detail, the official maintains that “in the schools uniformity is demanded” in the physical aspect of the student body and that this detail is supported by the general regulations.

The official acknowledges that there was a time when the length of males’ hair was strictly regulated, but that now they may “wear their mane to the collar.” Formerly males’ hair could be no more than just over an inch long.

In the eighties the crusade against hair length and the maintenance of aesthetic uniformity among students even jumped to the pages of the official newspapers. However, the José Martí Pioneer Organization (for elementary schools) and the Federation of Middle School Students did not mediate in favor of those they represent and the students did not win that symbolic battle for differentiation.

Nevertheless, controls have softened over the years, especially since the economic crisis forced families to substitute parts of the school uniform for home-made ones or to buy their children’s school shoes in the hard currency markets as a result of a breakdown in the supply of manufactured products in the ration market.

Now it is common to see students in the regulated garments modified with pleats, raised hems or adjusted sleeves.

Nor do girls and young women escape the restrictions. “In this classroom you come to study and those nails decorated with figures or painted with phosphorescent colors distract the attention of other students,” a Spanish teacher tells his students at Baragua Protest Junior High School in Central Havana.

So far this year, at least ten girls from the school say they have had problems with the manicure they were wearing when the school year began. In contrast, the pressure for them is less in terms of hair; if they dye their hair blond or red it is ignored, although other tones, such as violet, blue or green may not be.

“Reality evolves faster than school regulations,” explains Zulema Vázquez, a sociologist with two school age children. “The teaching authorities have a mentality from the last century and are not prepared to deal with the new situations that are taking place,” she says.

The specialist considers that any attempt at uniformity in terms of physical appearance eventually causes children and adolescents to find more sophisticated ways to differentiate themselves. “It can be the length of the skirt, a piercing, adjustments made to a blouse, the color or the length of the hair, but in one way or another, they will find a way to break the monotony,” argues Vázquez.

María Molina, mother of a teenager in Cienfuegos, told 14ymedio that her 14-year-old son was unable to start the school year at José Gregorio Technological Institute where he is training to be a “teacher of agriculture,” because his teacher and the school’s principal did not allow him to attend with his dyed hair.

According to Molina, the teacher and the director warned that “if you don’t cut your hair or dye it black” he would not be admitted. The mother tried to negotiate an intermediate solution and proposed that the young man cut his hair a little every week until the dyed part disappears, but her alternative was not accepted.

“As a mother I feel frustrated, I called the provincial and municipal education department and everyone repeats that we have to respect the school regulations,” she concludes with irritation.

In countries like France or England public telephones are on the verge of extinction, given the advance of cellular networks. In Spain, despite being a very deficient service and with an 84% decrease in available phones in the last 15 years (from 55,000 to 18,000 nationwide), the service is still required by law and the company with the concession was forced to renew its contract in 2017, when a public tender received no takers. As in Spain, the Cuban government is committed to maintaining, through the Telecommunications Company of Cuba (Etecsa), a service that is used by lower income citizens.

At the end of last year, the country operated 59,818 public phones, including 8,588 coin operated phones. For this year, the state communications monopoly plans to install 500 new public phones, of which 45 are intended especially for people with disabilities.

At the end of 2015, the country had only 1,333,034 fixed lines – in a country with over 11 million people – of which 996,063 served the residential sector, according to data from the Statistical Yearbook published by the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI). The installation of phone lines in homes has grown very slowly in recent years and between 2010 and 2015 just over 185,000 lines were added throughout the country.

Along with the poor quality of bread and the transportation problems, the problems with public phone service dominate the criticisms most heard on the streets and raised in the local People’s Power Accountability Meetings, where people can sound off to their elected officials. Deterioration, vandalism and the scarcity of phones in heavily populated areas are the subject of complaints.

Raquel Stone, a commercial specialist for ETECSA’s Public Telephone Services Division, told the official media that every year the company must repair thousands of public phones rendered unusable due to vandalism. The most common damage is having the handset pulled out.

Repairing the equipment represents an expense of 1,000 Cuban convertible pesos (CUC, 1 CUC = roughly 1 USD) for each coin-operated device, and between 330 and 400 CUC for each device that operates only with prepaid cards.

“The publics,” as they are popularly called, are in high demand not only among those who cannot afford a cell phone, but also among those who carry a cellphone so they can be reached, but make most outgoing calls from the devices located in the streets.

“If I call you and hang up on the second ring, it means I’m going to see you, but if I call you and let it ring, I can’t go,” a teenage girl shouts from the sidewalk to her friend who had just gotten on the bus. “But don’t pick up because I have almost nothing left on my cell,” she adds. The 0.35 CUC it costs for each minute of a cellphone call represents approximately half the daily salary of a professional.

In spite of these rates, in July of this year the number of active cellphone lines in the country reached 4,313,000. The growth experienced since Cubans were first authorized to contract for the service, in 2008, still places Cuba at the tail end of Latin American countries.

Only 35.5% of the Cuban population has access to cellular service, in contrast to nations such as Panama, where usage surpasses the number of inhabitants and is at the top of the region, with a 172% penetration rate for cellphone service. In Guatemala the rate is 115% and in Puerto Rico 88%.

Aníbal Lorenzo, a 32-year-old pedicab driver who has been living in Havana for two months, is one of millions of Cubans who can not even dream of a cell phone. To maintain communication with his family in Guantánamo, he purchased a prepaid card that he uses on the public network. The worker laments that coin-operated phones almost never work.

“I have searched all the phones that are on Amistad Street,” he says while testing several unsuccessful phones. A few feet away, a young woman picks up a headset and hears the ringing tone, but before she starts to talk, she takes out a handkerchief from her purse and cleans the area near her mouth. “They are always dirty and stink,” she complains.

The telecommunications company has installed some public telephones in funeral homes, hospitals and pharmacies. The caller must dial 1-69-69 and charge the amount to the recipient of the call. The option is little known yet, but it can get one out of a bind.

“They stole my purse on the bus and a man told me that in a nearby Emergency Room there was a telephone that had that service,” says Rosaura, a young architect who before that incident not “touched a public phone for more than five years.” Now, she recognizes that in certain situations you have to go back to the old fashioned way.

In the last decade, attempts have been made internationally to offer new uses from public phone booths. In Spain for example, in addition to accepting payment by credit card, some have enabled the possibility of sending emails and SMS to mobile phones. Despite this, it has not been possible to avoid a fall off of 84% in this service in just 15 years.

In France phone booths have become public libraries in some localities, while in London the legendary red wooden cubicles are leased to small business owners who have turned them into small businesses, such as craft shops or tiny florists.

In the imposing building on the corner of Águila and Dragones streets, the ETECSA headquarters is located in a property that belonged to the American company AT&T more than five decades ago, when it was nationalized. In one of its rooms, a museum preserves several models of the first public telephones that were installed in the Island.

“All this is active thanks to a group of retirees who maintain the equipment,” says María del Carmen, one of the local workers. “In telecommunications schools, only new technology is taught now,” and these pensioners are “the only ones who have mastered these devices.”

A few yards from María del Carmen, a young woman receives a call on her cell phone while waiting to pay her telephone bill. She responds hurriedly and with short phrases. “Hang on, I’ll call you from an public phone,” she says as she looks around at the nearest devices.

For each child, Lopéz and his wife have so far invested 740 Cuban pesos (CUP), the equivalent of an average monthly salary according to the latest data provided by the National Bureau of Statistics and Information (ONEI), but they predict that the figure will exceed 1,000 CUP by the time they acquire some missing items.

Families are guided by the simple motto: buy the most durable products at the lowest possible price.

“We have to try to find most of the things that are used throughout the school year and now is the time to buy,” says the father. “You almost always think of the most visible, but you also have to look for socks, shorts for PE and notebooks.”

Lopez is a designer, while his wife works as a secretary in a branch of the Ministry of Transportation. Both remember the 1980s when they entered primary school and “in school they gave us almost everything.” But the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the economic crisis have reduced those subsidies to the minimum.

The Government has significantly reduced its investment in the education sector, from 14.1% of GDP in 2005 to 9% in 2017

In recent years the Government has significantly reduced its investment in the education sector, from 14.1% of GDP in 2005 to 9% in 2017. The cut affects the physics and chemistry labs, audiovisual equipment, and the teaching materials given to each student.

For the 2017-2018 academic year, the Minister of Education, Ena Elsa Velázquez Cobiella, told the official press that “all textbooks and workbooks are guaranteed,” although she acknowledged that there are problems with “paper, because there is a delay in the arrival of that resource from abroad.”

School uniforms cost less than 10 Cuban pesos (about 40¢ US) at subsidized prices, but the quantity delivered is limited and there is little variety in sizes. In Miami, with a large Cuban community, several stores offer the uniform pieces — blouses, shirts, skirts, shorts and trousers — the students are required to wear in primary and secondary education on the island. These days the emigrants receive frequent orders for these products from their families in Cuba.

“To guarantee a clean uniform every day, I have to buy at least three blouses and two skirts, says Damy, a 34-year-old Santiagan whose daughter is starting the second grade in September. Resellers offer each piece at a price ranging from 50 to 75 CUP, more than five times the cost  in the state stores, which offer only one uniform per child at the subsidized price.

After the uniform, shoes are one of the main concerns because in the state stores they cost between 140 and 380 CUP. To that is added the amount for the socks (25 CUP per pair) and the backpack (never less than 300 CUP) which brings the sum to the monthly salary of an engineer or a teacher.

“This is not over, the next few months my wife and I will be working almost exclusively so that our children can go to school with a clean uniform, pencils, notebooks and some cookies for a snack”

There are no official data on the expenses incurred by an average family for each child who starts school, but several economists consulted by this newspaper agree that it represents a difficult challenge given that the purchasing power of the Cuban worker has declined in recent years to only 28% of what was received in 1989.

Last July, the economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago told the conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) that although “free and universal access are important and redeemable points” of the Cuban education system, it is necessary “to focus resources on those provinces and people who cannot pay for their studies.”

The situation becomes tense a few days before the beginning of September. Although the uniform is mandatory, social inequalities arise in the quality of the footwear or the backpack. In the past, school officials have tried to prevent students bringing snacks or sandwiches that indicate greater purchasing power to the classroom, but they’ve lost the battle because the schools no longer are able to provide free snacks, as they did in the past.

“Before they gave the students crayons, pencils and notebooks of better quality, but now all that is up to the family,” complains Yander Lopéz. Books are distributed among students free of charge, but must be returned at the end of the course. Higher income families buy part of these “basic study materials” on the black market.

This school year, families’ pockets are emptied a little more by the costs of the school snack, the so-called “reinforcement” of the school-provided lunch by which the families improve their children’s nutrition in the semi-boarding schools, and the purchase of cleaning supplies, which parents must provide for some schools that are receiving fewer and fewer tools and supplies to clean the buildings.

“This is not over, the next few months my wife and I will be working almost exclusively so that our children can go to school with a clean uniform, pencils, notebooks and some cookies for a snack,” laments Lopéz.