HAVANA, Cuba. – The Pre-University Vocational Institutes of Exact Sciences (IPVCE) had their genesis in the Vladimir Ilich Lenin school, inaugurated in Havana on January 31, 1974, on the occasion of the visit to Cuba of the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev.
It was a new school, which combined study with work, and in which secondary and pre-university education was taught. From the beginning, the educational center had magnificent material conditions, which distinguished it from the rest of the educational institutions in the country.
A few years later that school (known as La Lenin) reduced its enrollment to students who were studying pre-university, and immediately began to strengthen its content in subjects such as Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, with a view to preparing talented students in those subjects. In this way, students would better assimilate the contents of the subjects they would receive at the universities, in addition to encouraging their vocation for scientific activity.
Soon the IPVCE were spread throughout the country, with requirements that applicants to enroll in them had to meet, such as having obtained a grade higher than 85 points in basic secondary school subjects, and also showing sympathy for the existing political regime on the Island.
However, the passage of time, with very adverse stages such as “Special Period” in the 90s and COVID-19 more recently, eroded the prestige of these centers, in which apathy also played an important role. Its teaching staff was decimated by the exodus and emigration of many teachers. The good material conditions of yesteryear are just memories, and a good part of the students no longer see those schools as ideal centers for their training.
Two reports appeared in the newspaper Rebel Youthin the editions of February 1 and 8, report on the decline experienced by the IPVCE, and the nostalgia with which many students who studied in their classrooms remember those times of splendor of those schools.
However, in the reports there was also the feeling that the good progress of these centers could be recovered, and it was expressed that, even with the obstacles they faced, better teaching results were obtained than those reported by conventional pre-university schools. While in the latter only 53% of students passed the three university entrance exams, in the IPVCE the figure rose to 84%.
Even at the end of the second of the reportsa senior official from the Ministry of Education, when referring to the IPVCE, pointed out: “The challenge is not only to preserve what has been achieved, but to update the model so that it continues to be a space where youth talent finds opportunities to grow and put their knowledge at the service of the country.”
But, evidently, the reports of Rebel Youth They had been drafted before the Castro regime announced the transition to a “state of war” to confront the fuel shortage in the country.
Thus, on February 7, the newspaper Granma announced the holding of an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers, in which the head of the Ministry of Education, Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, asserted that “the IPVCE students would continue their classes in the pre-university schools closest to their homes.”
That is to say, there are no means of transportation to transport these students to the IPVCE where they were enrolled.
This statement by the minister constitutes in practice an announcement of the dismantling of the IPVCE. So that phrase from Castro I, in the sense that the future of Cuba would have to be that of “men of science,” could go to one of the gigantic garbage dumps that spread throughout the nation.
