Trinidad

April 9, 2007

This past week we visited part of Havana called Ciudad Libertad which is essentially a town of various schools. Within the school there is a small museum dedicated to the Literacy Campaign. Right after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the Castro regime began a campaign to eliminated illiteracy in Cuba. Students, teachers, and workers were trained and sent to different regions in the country in order to teach people to read a write. They lived and worked with the families they taught during the day and at night held lessons. In less than a year Cuba was able to decrease its illiteracy drastically. People who had lived their whole lives not knowing how to even sign their name were taught to do so. According to Cuban historical documents a women who was over 100 years old was taught to read and write. Today Cuba has helped develop literacy programs throughout the world, especially in Latin America with the hopes of helping other developing countries fulfill this development requirement.

After the small visit to the museum we visited a special education school. This school had children with vision impairments as well as autistic children. As we toured the school it became obvious that integration was a main project in the school. Children who suffered from impaired vision, as severe as blindness, and as acute as wearing glasses, were placed in the same classrooms which allowed them to learn together. Teachers taught using not only the blackboard but also texts in Braille for the blind students. We watched part of a class and the teacher seemed to make no distinction between students, she asked a blind student to read allowed just as frequently as she asked a child who wore glasses. She did however explain to us that because of the integration of students her job is often a little more difficult and overcoming obstacles in teaching various students is sometimes hard. We stopped by one of the computer labs in the school. Each computer as would have been expected in the U.S. had a magnification program as well as voice command programs in which a series of keyboard presses can activate different programs and work like the mouse for students to are blind. I was surprised that the school would have this technology. As many people do not have access to computers I thought it was interesting that a school would be able to have more than one computer with more than basic programs. We also visited an art class. Each student was given different projects, all revolving around some civic theme, embossing an image of Che Guevara, coloring the Cuban flag, or for those students who were blind, making small projects with natural elements, like seeds, leaves, which represented Cuba. The art room was full of projects that students had made all of which were as expected very tactile and textured for students to experience. Before we left the students sang a song and performed a small dance number for us to thank us for our visit.

This past weekend we traveled to Trinidad and Villa Clara for our culture class. We first stopped in Villa Clara to visit the Che Guevara memorial, which essentially contained a large plaza and a large monument with a museum where he is buried. It was not a very beautiful monument as was crawling with tour buses full of European tourists. We spent the night at a hotel in the Escambray mountains. As our bus pulled up the hotel looked as if it could have once been a family resort. It is tucked away in the middle of the mountains on a lake. It has boat rentals, a ‘playground’, a few bars, and a disco. Unfortunately the hotel is built in the prefabrication soviet style and it completely made of concrete which has been painted in bright colors which clash with the green of the mountains. That night we went to see a play in a small playhouse in the mountains. The play focused on the 1960s in Cuba and the problems young people faced. It was interesting although I am not sure if I understood all of the play. The next morning we departed for Trinidad. Trinidad lies on the southern coast of Cuba about two miles from the Caribbean Sea. It is one city dedicated to tourism. We went because it has the only Semana Santa (holy week) celebration in Cuba. It became obvious that the revival of the celebration after the visit in 1997 of Pope John Paul II was for tourists. Very few locals seemed to be witnessing the procession but rather the streets were lined with tourists all flashing their cameras. Despite this it was interesting to witness. We obviously went to the beach for the day which was again covered in sunburned tourists. Our last night in Trinidad we went to a disco which was inside a cave, and located a short walk from the city center, and was one of the most creative clubs I have ever seen. After reaching the cave it is necessary to descend a series of stairs which lead to different caverns, some of which have nothing in them and others which have the bathroom or a small sitting area, the bar, or the dance floor. It was very interesting listening to the music bounce of the walls of the cave. It was an exhausting weekend and we were all happy to finally arrive back in Havana only to have six hours of class today.