HAVANA
SCHOOL DAZE
You can never tell what Havana is hiding behind its decomposing Glamour Queen facade. The buildings of the old town, once an ostentatious mix of fin-de-sciecle splendor and stream-lined art deco have merged into a uniform peeled paint grey. Corinthian columns and elaborate ironworks sulk, forgotten, in dark alleys. Once lovely inner courtyard oasis act as convenient landing pads for bags of rubbish launched from upper story windows. All exterior staircases, especially the ones carved from wood, are suspect. Havana is rotting, it's rusting, it often stinks and it's very much alive.
Out walking, one grey morning, I see a colourful class of school children, eight maybe ten years old. They are waiting to cross the street. Singing and holding hands, two by two, waiting for their teacher to give them the sign to break formation and run for it.
I stop and watch. The signal comes. They run. The teacher is leading the way but an older boy, about eleven, is shepherding behind. I probably wouldn't have noticed him if he hadn't been carrying a framed, three foot high portrait of Ché Guevera. I follow them.
They are heading straight towards my hotel. Half a block before they reached it, the juvenile centipede makes a sharp left turn into an opening in the wall.
I give the boy with the poster time to pass through then, casually, I walk slowly past. There, open on to the street like a French sidewalk cafe, is a classroom full of six year olds. A school.
I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. I have walked past this building dozens of times and have always assumed it was yet another run down tenement. I stand back and appraised the structure. Decades ago, it had been an ornate, lovely, three story private house.
There is a cluster of teachers standing in what would have been the vestibule. One of them, a wiry women, smoking, in her thirties, catches my eye.
I smile.
She smiles back.
And, suddenly, with a speed nearly unheard of in Havana, I am touring the school.
The six year olds are in what had probably been the drawing room. The old dinning room, brightly painted ceiling becoming increasingly cloudy, houses a class of raucous nine year olds. The eight year olds are up one narrow wooden flight in the study. The third floor is for the older students. The rooms are much smaller. Servants quarters probably.
It had been a beautiful house. But that was a long time ago, before the paintings on the walls had been replaced by posters of revolutionary heros. Certainly before the school children had been born. Probably before most of the teacher had been born.
The rooms are sparse, the desk and chairs old, the blackboards rubbed brown. Most of the children, some barefoot but all well-fed and keen, are using note books that have clearly been used many times before, their penciled notes erased at the end of each year.
I point at a one of the omnipresent faded posters of Ché and ask my hostess, now on her third cigarette, about the poster the young boy had been carrying in the street.
She gets excited. She speaks fast when she gets excited. Two cigarettes later, I finally figure it out.
The primary school is preparing for one of the most important days on its calender. The day when the six year olds are inducted into grade one. The day when the grade threes ceremoniously exchange the blue scarf they wore for the past three years for the red one they will wear for the next three. The school is preparing to commemorate the day Ché Guevera died in a hail of bullets in Bolivia.
My new friend invites me to attend tomorrow's show. I say I'd be honoured.
At nine a.m. the next morning, I walk down to Revolution Park, the small patch of widened street and disheartened flora directly in front of the Ministry of the Interior and across a thundering boulevard from the Museum of the Revolution.
The students are already there, spiffed up, divided into classes and surrounded by beaming relatives. I spot my friend. She is so frantic, she isn't even smoking. My boy is still carrying his Che poster but now he stands just a shade more erect. Graduation day.
Then, it starts. Class by class they sing. Graceful young children step out of formation to make heartfelt speeches. A sparkling twelve year old raised her voice in an achingly beautiful solo, chorused by her classmates.
A young cadet from the Ministry of the Interior, not more than seventeen or eighteen, takes to the make-shift podium and speaks with the fervor of a preacher. The same phrases echo throughout: "Seremos como Ché", "Amigo Ché", "Ché, Commandante".
The square is charged with emotion, reaching a climax when the young ones, around eight years old, form a 'V' and face the podium.
A parent flanks each child and, on cue, awkwardly unties the student's blue neckerchief and knots in it's place a red one. All glow with pride and love.
I turn to the grinning Cuban next to me and ask what had just happened. He explains that the blue neckerchief symbolizes that the child is willing to "die in a hail of bullets for Socialism." But, now that they are older, they are eligible to "die in a hail of bullets for Communism", just like their hero Ché.
The ceremony ends with the playing of a scratchy record of a speech by Ché. It is the root of many of the songs, poems and speeches that had been made by the young students.
It ends with the impassioned cry: "Patria o Muerte", homeland or death. Most children fidget, as any child whom, after an enforced period of good behaviour sees the end in sight. But some have tears in their eyes. They are the tears of a patriotic American hearing the 'Star Spangled Banner' or a Christian hearing 'Onward Christian Soldier'. They are the tears of faith.
