Cuba: A Happy Childhood

Although insufficient to meet the demand from working mothers, there are now more than a thousand children’s centres in the country to benefit about 115,480 children

When June the first dawns in Cuba and the first rays of sun light up the faces of happiness of their children, thousands of them throughout our small geographic size and in turn giant island for its humanism, will already be impeccably dressed in their red and white uniform to undertake the way to school, while many toddlers attend, as every day, their children’s circle.

So a new day of discoveries, antics, teachings and many games starts for them.

Although insufficient to meet the demand from working mothers, there are now more than a thousand children’s centres in the country to benefit about 115,480 children, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Education, for the year 2015- 2016. Hence the potential of non-state forms of management allow other infants to be served by people authorized to exercise this activity.

In kindergartens they are attended by teams of educators and assistants, with established game schedules, sleeping and eating. While the program Educate your Cild serves more than 70% of children from zero to six years old and their families, with the participation also of the family doctors.

The life of these cheerful little one’s is incomparable to that had by many of their grandparents before the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, when there were 600,000 infants in the island without schools, ten thousand unemployed teachers and one million illiterate.

While millions of children in the world have to work to help support the family and attending a school is a chimera, in Cuba 121,731 children attend preschool, 680,829 are enrolled in primary education and 37,025 special schools. All of them, without distinction, have opened the doors of knowledge for free. Their only “concern” is to be good students to build a future.

Another of the great achievements of Cuba has been to reduce the infant mortality rate from 60 per thousand live births before 1959, and keep it below five per thousand live births in the last eight years, which places this indicator ahead of developed nations.

These results are held largely in mass immunization campaigns, with which they eliminated more than a dozen diseases that disappeared from the concerns of Cuban families and the establishment of a health system accessible, free and of quality. Among these evils two were a nightmare, polio and meningitis.

Cuba’s ratification of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Worst Forms of Child Labour and Immediate Action for the Elimination confirms the willingness of the government to protect all the rights of children.

This step taken by Cuba is in line with the objectives of the International Labour Organization (ILO) to achieve the elimination of child labour in the world, a serious problem, say experts, not infrequently threatening health and the physical and emotional development of children. In addition it threatens their right to education, as many are forced to dropout to help support the family.

To this is added that one of every four children under five in the world has inadequate size for their age because of poverty, 66 million of primary school age in developing countries attend school hungry, of which 23 million are in Africa, and 57 million children do not attend classes due to lack of opportunities