Matanzas/Last Monday, Yadira was not in the classroom with his students, as each did each Start of course Since she graduated as a comprehensive general professor in 2003. “Leaving the teaching has been one of the most difficult decisions of my life, but I am tired that teaching is a profession so little valued and so badly remunerated in this country,” confesses the teacher, who worked in two primary schools of Matanzas. After many years of sacrifice, he chose to change their jobs.
His new position as an official of the Municipal Construction Union will not report much greater income, but will allow him something that values more: free time to devote himself to his family and access to construction materials. He lives with his three children in Matanzas, while trying to conclude his house, started in 2011 and still retains a land floor. “I agreed to come in 2008 from Bayamo because they promised me a house that never arrived,” he explains to 14ymedio.
The provincial educational panorama shows the cracks of the system. This week, 98,000 students began the course in Matanzas, but with a deficit teaching coverage: from an planned workforce of 9,511 places, only 7,478 have been covered. According to the provincial deputy director of Education, Eledis Abreu Domech, the gap of more than 2,000 teachers is supplied with contracts per hour and other patches. The most affected municipalities are Matanzas, Colón and Cárdenas.
The deficit responds not only to low wages, but also to bad living conditions, and especially housing
The deficit responds not only to the low wages, but also to the bad living conditions, and especially housing, of those who have been transferred from other provinces to exercise the teaching in the city. Yadira remembers that he spent three years in a shelter for teachers, washing by hand and eating what appeared, until members of her Baptist Church helped her get a small land and lift the room of her house.
Frustration accumulated: “It is not just salary. Between absurd meetings and prohibitions, it is impossible to teach quality,” laments the woman.
According to the most recent salary scale, Yadira had to receive 5,369 pesos, plus a bonus of 80 by seniority. “With that I cannot keep my children. I am a single mother and my 44 years I still depend on the help of my parents,” he laments. Think about giving particular reviews at home, something forbidden while working at school.
Although in his new job in the union he will win 400 pesos less, he obtains greater autonomy: less bureaucracy, more time for his family and can take care of exercising leadership in his Baptist Church. “I will try to continue working for the State, but I will not accept impositions against my faith or my personal development. If something positive leaves me this decision is that I will never work for someone who does not value my effort.”
As an additional advantage, its new job brings it closer to a source of construction resources that can accelerate the termination of your home. As a teacher, for Yadira it was practically impossible to buy from electrical switches to cement bags with which to conclude the works on a project that has already cost her more than a decade of work and concerns.
During her work as a teacher she felt that attention to teaching staff is one of the great lack of the Cuban education system. The list of teachers’ duties is long but the stimuli remain in some diploma or an official act where they are given a flower or a picture with the face of a partisan leader. This disinterest does not agree with the importance that, in the formation of new generations, they have people like her.
Yadira admits that he would like to return to teaching, but he sees him more and more difficult: “They are running out of teachers, and the worst thing is that they do nothing to prevent it. It is as if they don’t care,” he concludes.
