Inflation forces Cuban parents to choose between buying food or school uniforms for their children

From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice and Equity with some assistance from our Bureau of Impossible Choices Faced by Parents in Latrine American Totalitarian Hellholes

Ay! Imagine having to choose between food on the table and school uniforms for your kids. In Cuba this year, this is no idle exercise in philosophical ethics. It’s a very real dilemma.

This is socialism at work. “Free” education for children doesn’t involve uniforms, and, oh, they must all have uniforms, like good little soldiers-and-robots-in-the-making. And that’s not all. All school supplies must be purchased by parents too.

Those uniforms are an essential part of their brainwashing. But, oh, you, mom and dad, you and you alone must pay for those uniforms, supplies, and incidentals out of your meager and never-adjusted salaries in the midst of rampant hyperinflation. The schools have no notebooks or pencils or other essential items.

Welcome to the Caribbean’s most widely admired socialist utopia. Welcome to the world’s most admired “free” education. Welcome to hell.

Loosely translated from Marti Noticias

In September the new 2023-2024 school year will begin in Cuba in the midst of a complex economic situation in the country.

“A pair of tennis shoes for a high school child, 7,000 pesos, national currency, which the wages here do not give us. I don’t earn that, I earn 4,000 pesos, my husband earns 5,800. The child’s parents, one studies, who is studying medicine, and what he earns is a 600 pesos stipend. The backpacks, the notebooks, the pencil, everything, you have to buy everything,” Amelia Sardiña, a grandmother living in the city of Pinar del Río, told Martí news.

Sardiña assures that it is difficult to get school uniforms. “Obtaining uniforms… it’s a real strugge because there’s only a small quantity, and everyone needs to buy them.”

However, in the municipal office of Education in Pinar del Río, an official who answered the call from Radio Martí said: “No, no, no. If parents are talking about it, it’s a lie. Here everyone is ready to start the school year and all the conditions are created for that”.

Zaida Viera, mother of school-age children, who lives in San Miguel del Padrón, Havana, commented that she starts the course and, for many parents, at an unaffordable cost.

“They are unattainable, because imagine, everything costs. The notebooks at the moment are costing about 90 pesos. They are very expensive”.

Zaida Viera is very worried about the cost of all of the items that parents need to purchase: “The backpack, the snacks, the book covers. For a worker, this beginning of the school year means spending a month without buying enough food to eat. All we can afford is cheap food, a small meal… just so we can buy our boy all the items he takes to school,” she said.

continue reading HERE in Spanish