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National law and policies on fee or for free – Cuba

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

It is as difficult as it is necessary to analyse two facets of education in Cuba separately. On the one hand, its accomplishments in ensuring free education have been much praised and rightly so. On the other hand, the government’s denial of educational pluralism and repression of all attempts to teach and learn alternatives to governmental ideology and policy have been frequently condemned, also rightly so. International human rights law requires both facets to be examined in conjunction because both are important to make education free, in all different meanings of this word.

 

These two facets tend to be separated and Cuba described in comparative education does not resemble Cuba described in human rights literature. The priority which the US government has attached to condemning and sanctioning Cuba keeps the Cold War alive.

 

Within the United Nations, US initiatives (direct or by proxy) have yielded a number of condemnatory resolutions on human rights violations in Cuba.1084 These have been increasingly depleted of substance  because dialogue on human rights was supplanted by political posturing, as is often the case within the United Nations. The European Union has tried out a less confrontational and condemnatory response to human rights violations in Cuba by imposing and lifting diplomatic sanctions but that approach has not yielded any change in governmental policy either.

 

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has reacted on a number of occasions to repression in Cuba. Often, education was targeted and especially human rights education. The Commission has found that restrictions upon political rights, freedom of expression and freedom to form and express opinions have, during past decades, institutionalized permanent and systematic denial of fundamental rights.

 

Education is free in Cuba in the sense of being free of charge  but it is not free in the sense of freedom to teach and learn. The law mandates “educating the young as communists”. Their possible resistance to being educated as communists is defined as “a residual ideological problem”, whose eradication is everybody’s task.   In the government’s interpretation, the right to education means access to government-controlled and government-provided schools and universities.

 

The development of education, culture and science is the prerogative of the state, and they should be founded on Marxism-Leninism. For example, ”artistic creativity is free as long as its content is not contrary to the Revolution”. Because education is defined as a function of the state, all educational institutions belong to the state and all education is provided free of charge. The meaning of free of charge triggered in 1983 a dilemma. All learning materials and textbooks had been distributed free of charge but the students’ union (there is only one in the country) asked whether students should not be allowed to buy books. The parliamentary verdict was that this was permitted by the law. Students could purchase books which then became their personal property for future use in work or study.