Tick-Tock Man
2003-12-12 06:11:32 UTC
On page 56 of Cuba's first-grade reading textbook, students are taught
through a combination of words and drawings that the letter ``F'' stands for
Felito, a child's name, and fusil, a military rifle.
``Felito sharpens the mocha [a short machete],'' read the practice sentences
in ¡A Leer!. ``Beside it, he places the fusil.'' Just below the surface of
those simple words lies a deeper meaning, a Communist concept that students
in the Cuban educational system quickly learn, whether they choose to
embrace it or not: ``Estudio, Trabajo, Fusil.'' Study, Work, Rifle.
The phrase is not just the political motto for Cuba's Communist Youth Union.
It has also been the center of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's hope for the
future of Communism on the island: the interlocking of education and
political indoctrination.
Last October, the government made it clear that ideological content in
schools is a top priority. In closing the government's second national
education workshop -- held in Santiago de Cuba -- Rolando Alfonso Borges,
head of the Ideological Department of the Cuban Communist Party's Central
Committee, declared:
``The front line of political-ideological work with children is school, and
the first soldiers are teachers and other education workers. We have to put
our hearts into political-ideological work, and it must be done in a
systematic way, where each section of the educational system has specific
responsibilities that it must account for and which the party must
control.''
This past school year, children were pulled out of school more than ever to
attend government-orchestrated rallies demanding the return of Elián
González. And according to Santiago Press, an independent press agency in
Cuba, the government has stepped up indoctrination efforts outside school.
It has created a junior version of neighborhood spy networks for children
ages 4 to 13. The agency reported in January that the first children's
committee was formed in Cuevitas, near Santiago de Cuba, under the motto:
``Vigilance, fundamental duty of the child.''
But despite the government's heightened efforts, parents and dissidents say
a combination of limited career and job opportunities and the bleak reality
of daily life under Communism have conspired to make it harder for Castro to
indoctrinate children.
``A lot of young people visit my home and they have many concerns, they ask
themselves why Cubans don't have the same rights as others do -- can't go to
college, can't rent a hotel room in their own city,'' said one Havana
parent, Lázara Brito. ``They say `I'm burning the midnight oil and for what?
I can make more money selling pizza from my house.' These kids are different
than those of past times.'' Political indoctrination is the part of the
Cuban educational system rarely mentioned alongside the praise that the
country receives for achieving near-universal literacy, for having one of
the best academic performances among Latin American countries according to
UNESCO, and for developing top-notch teachers.
BACK TO SCHOOL
Officials will start dossiers on students
As American students head back to school this month for another year of
math, science and grammar, children starting school in Cuba will learn songs
and poems about Castro and Cuban Revolution heroes such as Che Guevara and
Celia Sánchez. Officials will start a dossier on each student, where not
only their grades, but their political and religious activities will be
recorded. The expediente acumulativo escolar, as the dossier is called, will
follow the student to his or her job, where bosses will keep similar tabs.
Elementary school students of both sexes will automatically become Pioneros,
or Pioneers, a kind of Communist version of the Boy Scouts with a heavy
military and watchdog bent. They'll perform neighborhood watches, in which,
generally accompanied by adults, they'll question passersby for
identification, and keep an eye on neighbors.
Middle and high-school students will start their school days by singing
anthems and reciting speeches about a figure of the Cuban Revolution, or
talk about a current or historical event -- from the Communist perspective.
Their teachers will start each class with 15 more minutes of similar
discussion, as required by law. Students will learn how to clean, assemble
and use weapons.
Students with college aspirations must join and remain active in the
Communist Youth Union. They must take part in numerous conferences, marches,
rallies and more military training. They must spend 45 days of their summer
at a country school, working in fields during the morning and attending
classes in the afternoon.
``They say education in Cuba is free, but we have it on very hard terms,''
Brito said. ``Education in Cuba has a political foundation. It doesn't make
students think. It teaches them that the Cuban way is the right way and
everything outside it is wrong.''
Meanwhile, say detractors, teachers are leaving the profession in droves for
better-paying work in the tourist sector and the government is hastily
filling vacancies with graduate education students.
``The goal of this system is to create false nationalism -- something that
has hurt our youth tremendously,'' said Roberto De Miranda, president of El
Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes (the Independent Teachers' Association)
in Havana. ``It is a grotesque invention, a lie that has been perpetrated
for 40 years.''
And it's all for naught, he said.
``There isn't one young person on the island who believes in Communism,'' he
said. ``Our youth is more rebellious by the day and less [academically]
prepared. They reject the system because there is too much manipulation. We
are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.''
When Castro took over in 1959, he considered education a key tool for his
dream of creating a New Society, where a New Man would be molded to be
devoted to the causes of revolution and Communism.
He declared 1961 ``the year of education.'' Education was nationalized,
private schools were ordered closed, and a sweeping literacy campaign was
started, designed to indoctrinate the country's illiterate population --
then estimated at 24 percent -- while teaching people to read.
The regime's first minister of education visited Russia, and brought back
ideas on blending education, physical labor and political ideology.
Old textbooks were replaced with ideologically correct new ones. Literature
contrary to Communism was banned, and in its place, students began to read,
analyze and write about Castro's lengthy speeches.
``The concept is to use education as an instrument to create a new man,
whose god is revolution,'' said Luis Zúñiga, director of the human rights
division of the Cuban American National Foundation, author of a booklet on
the Cuban education system titled The Children of Fidel Castro. In 1978, the
government passed the 116-article Code of the Child, which includes
statements on the importance of the Marxist-Leninist formation of children
and on the need for the state to protect children ``against all influences
contrary to their communist formation.''
To many parents, that simply means that the government takes away patria
potestad -- parents' right to choose for their children.
This is one of the fundamental lessons Lázara Brito says her 9-year-old son,
Isaac Cohen, is learning in his Havana elementary: ``Two sets of morality.''
Every day, she says, when Isaac's teacher asks him a politically loaded
question, he gives her the expected answer, while harboring in his heart the
very different values that Brito has taught him at home.
``He tells me `Mommy, I tell her what she wants to hear,''' Brito said.
Brito, wife of Miami resident José Cohen, and their three children -- Isaac,
Yamila, 13, and Yanelis, 16 -- were put in the spotlight during the Elián
González case because they have been denied permission to join Cohen despite
having visas since 1996. The children have been harassed in school because
of the family's decision to leave. Although he is only 9, Isaac, who will
start fourth grade Sept. 1, is an old hand at duplicity by necessity, Brito
said. The boy has gotten one type of education at school, and another one at
home, since he entered state-run pre-school, where children are fed
indoctrination, sometimes literally, as candy.
In one pre-school and kindergarten lesson all Cuban families are familiar
with, the teacher asks students whether they believe God exists. Children
who respond `yes' are asked to close their eyes and ask God for a piece of
candy. When they open their eyes and their hands are empty, the teacher asks
them to close their eyes again. This time, the teacher says, ask Fidel for
the candy.
When they do, the teacher places a piece of candy in each of their hands.
``See,'' the teacher will say, ``there is no God. There is only Fidel.''
Another example from ¡A Leer! (``Let's Read''), the first-grade reading
book, introduces children to a pillar of Cuban education --
anti-Americanism -- through a poem titled Girón, after the embattled beach
in 1961's Bay of Pigs Invasion: April is a very pretty month.
"In April, the flowers bloom.
And April is the month of Girón. One time, in April, the Yankees attacked
us. They sent a lot of bad people.
They wanted to destroy the free Cuba. The people defeated them. Fidel led
the fight."
And these days, Brito said, math word problems are about Cuba's symbolic
lawsuit against the United States. In May, Cuba's government demanded that
the United States pay $121 billion in damages for causing economic harm to
the island through the U.S. trade embargo. Washington has never commented on
the lawsuit.
At the end of the last school year, Isaac brought home a survey that Brito
was supposed to help him fill out. A sampling of the questions:
No. 10: Put the following activities in order, according to your tastes.
Among the choices: pionero campouts, neighborhood watch, neighborhood
clean-up, marches, watching television, attending church, and going to a
disco.
No. 14: Before the Revolution, your school building used to belong to people
who now live in the United States. Now, through the Helms-Burton Law, they
are reclaiming it from over there. What is your opinion about this
situation?
Because indoctrination in schools starts early, parents start
``deprogramming'' children early as well, said Jesús Yanes Pelletier, a
Havana parent and dissident. Yanes has a daughter, 14, and a son, 11, both
in middle school.
``After school, I sit them down and I tell them, `Everything that they
taught you today is a lie,' '' Yanes said. ``It's difficult for parents to
make the time to do it, but we have to.''
MIDDLE SCHOOL
`Country school' often means cheap labor, shabby conditions
But as his daughter Jenny grows up, Yanes says he's had more than skewed
course work to worry about. He dreads her having to attend a so-called
``country school.''
For 45 days, middle and high school students are sent to school/work-camps
in the countryside, where they toil in the fields for half the day, then
attend classes. Other students attend country boarding schools, where
children work and study the entire school year, and can only go home on a
weekend pass.
The idea behind the country schools is to allow the student to develop a
sense of community and teamwork while learning about the country's crops. In
reality, say parents and teachers, it translates into cheap labor in often
shabby conditions -- and an opportunity for children to grow up too fast.
Promiscuity, pregnancies, thefts, smoking and escapes to nearby towns are
common occurrences, said Emilia Ruvira, a former drawing teacher in a Havana
technical high school, now living in Miami.
Ruvira helped supervise a country school as part of her duties.
``The school was a wooden house, like a shed, that had bare cement floors,
outhouses and horrible food,'' she remembered. ``There were six teachers and
some staff there -- 10 people in all to supervise 300 kids. At 15, you want
to discover a lot of things. Almost everybody had sexual relations. And with
contraceptives being over the counter, it was easy.''
That scenario is what Yanes fears her daughter would inevitably be caught up
in.
``My daughter has not and never will she go to la escuela al campo,'' Yanes
said. ``The kids do what they want. Sometimes girls and boys sleep in the
same room, divided by a sheet. Thousands of girls have gotten pregnant -- by
teachers themselves.''
This year, a doctor's note managed to keep Jenny from country school. Next
year, Yanes said, he's going to have to get creative.
Andrés, a photographer who sells his work at the artist market alongside the
Malecón in Vedado, said he has started worrying about it early: His son is
nine months old. When he reaches high school, Andrés and his wife Ana say,
they'll find a doctor to say their boy has a spinal cord problem. ``These
are the tricks we do,'' Andrés said. At 17, Marcos De Miranda, one year away
from graduating college, was thrown out of his Havana high school. The
reason:
``They wanted him to say, in front of all his classmates, that his father
was anti-social,'' said Roberto De Miranda, Marcos' father.
When Marcos, now 21, refused, the elder De Miranda said, ``his grades were
lowered and he was thrown out.''
It was a matter of principle, said Roberto De Miranda, but it was a costly
and bitter consequence -- one that is hard to make his other children, who
have suffered harassment at school, understand.
``My kids tell me, `Dad, we can't study, and it's your fault that we are
languishing,' '' Roberto De Miranda said. ``Then I have to talk to them
about dignity, decorum and principle.'' While he admires his son for
standing up to his beliefs, the elder De Miranda can't help lamenting his
and others' futures being cut short.
``How many kids, how many doctors and engineers have we lost because
although their grades were good, they just didn't fit in politically?''
Certainly, Yanelis Cohen Brito is one.
The 16-year-old last saw the inside of a classroom a year ago, when she
passed ninth grade. It was a bittersweet time -- she'd earned excellent
notes, said her mother, but she was told she couldn't enroll in high school
because her family was planning to leave the country.
Now she sits at home all day, frustrated.
When Yanelis was expelled, school officials called her friends' parents,
telling them they shouldn't let their children associate with Yanelis.
Despite that, children have taken to gathering at the girl's home after
school.
``I hear their conversations and they are full of frustration and anxiety,''
Brito said. But most important, she said, ``they have started to think.''
``My generation was much more successfully indoctrinated,'' said Brito, 40.
``They more than any other generation see the difference between what
they're being taught and real life.''
Andrés, the photographer, shows a picture he took of a young Cuban boy in a
school uniform and Pioneer scarf. Next to the student is an ad picturing a
smiling delivery man holding a package. There is irony in the juxtaposition,
Andrés said. The boy is waiting for something, too -- his package, his
future, much as Andrés himself did, years ago. He said he had the typical
Cuban childhood: he was a Pioneer, worked in the fields, learned how to
shoot and clean a gun and march.
``To be prepared,'' he said, laughing.
For what?
Andrés laughed. ``I don't know.''
Related:
.Human rights and education in Cuba
through a combination of words and drawings that the letter ``F'' stands for
Felito, a child's name, and fusil, a military rifle.
``Felito sharpens the mocha [a short machete],'' read the practice sentences
in ¡A Leer!. ``Beside it, he places the fusil.'' Just below the surface of
those simple words lies a deeper meaning, a Communist concept that students
in the Cuban educational system quickly learn, whether they choose to
embrace it or not: ``Estudio, Trabajo, Fusil.'' Study, Work, Rifle.
The phrase is not just the political motto for Cuba's Communist Youth Union.
It has also been the center of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's hope for the
future of Communism on the island: the interlocking of education and
political indoctrination.
Last October, the government made it clear that ideological content in
schools is a top priority. In closing the government's second national
education workshop -- held in Santiago de Cuba -- Rolando Alfonso Borges,
head of the Ideological Department of the Cuban Communist Party's Central
Committee, declared:
``The front line of political-ideological work with children is school, and
the first soldiers are teachers and other education workers. We have to put
our hearts into political-ideological work, and it must be done in a
systematic way, where each section of the educational system has specific
responsibilities that it must account for and which the party must
control.''
This past school year, children were pulled out of school more than ever to
attend government-orchestrated rallies demanding the return of Elián
González. And according to Santiago Press, an independent press agency in
Cuba, the government has stepped up indoctrination efforts outside school.
It has created a junior version of neighborhood spy networks for children
ages 4 to 13. The agency reported in January that the first children's
committee was formed in Cuevitas, near Santiago de Cuba, under the motto:
``Vigilance, fundamental duty of the child.''
But despite the government's heightened efforts, parents and dissidents say
a combination of limited career and job opportunities and the bleak reality
of daily life under Communism have conspired to make it harder for Castro to
indoctrinate children.
``A lot of young people visit my home and they have many concerns, they ask
themselves why Cubans don't have the same rights as others do -- can't go to
college, can't rent a hotel room in their own city,'' said one Havana
parent, Lázara Brito. ``They say `I'm burning the midnight oil and for what?
I can make more money selling pizza from my house.' These kids are different
than those of past times.'' Political indoctrination is the part of the
Cuban educational system rarely mentioned alongside the praise that the
country receives for achieving near-universal literacy, for having one of
the best academic performances among Latin American countries according to
UNESCO, and for developing top-notch teachers.
BACK TO SCHOOL
Officials will start dossiers on students
As American students head back to school this month for another year of
math, science and grammar, children starting school in Cuba will learn songs
and poems about Castro and Cuban Revolution heroes such as Che Guevara and
Celia Sánchez. Officials will start a dossier on each student, where not
only their grades, but their political and religious activities will be
recorded. The expediente acumulativo escolar, as the dossier is called, will
follow the student to his or her job, where bosses will keep similar tabs.
Elementary school students of both sexes will automatically become Pioneros,
or Pioneers, a kind of Communist version of the Boy Scouts with a heavy
military and watchdog bent. They'll perform neighborhood watches, in which,
generally accompanied by adults, they'll question passersby for
identification, and keep an eye on neighbors.
Middle and high-school students will start their school days by singing
anthems and reciting speeches about a figure of the Cuban Revolution, or
talk about a current or historical event -- from the Communist perspective.
Their teachers will start each class with 15 more minutes of similar
discussion, as required by law. Students will learn how to clean, assemble
and use weapons.
Students with college aspirations must join and remain active in the
Communist Youth Union. They must take part in numerous conferences, marches,
rallies and more military training. They must spend 45 days of their summer
at a country school, working in fields during the morning and attending
classes in the afternoon.
``They say education in Cuba is free, but we have it on very hard terms,''
Brito said. ``Education in Cuba has a political foundation. It doesn't make
students think. It teaches them that the Cuban way is the right way and
everything outside it is wrong.''
Meanwhile, say detractors, teachers are leaving the profession in droves for
better-paying work in the tourist sector and the government is hastily
filling vacancies with graduate education students.
``The goal of this system is to create false nationalism -- something that
has hurt our youth tremendously,'' said Roberto De Miranda, president of El
Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes (the Independent Teachers' Association)
in Havana. ``It is a grotesque invention, a lie that has been perpetrated
for 40 years.''
And it's all for naught, he said.
``There isn't one young person on the island who believes in Communism,'' he
said. ``Our youth is more rebellious by the day and less [academically]
prepared. They reject the system because there is too much manipulation. We
are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.''
When Castro took over in 1959, he considered education a key tool for his
dream of creating a New Society, where a New Man would be molded to be
devoted to the causes of revolution and Communism.
He declared 1961 ``the year of education.'' Education was nationalized,
private schools were ordered closed, and a sweeping literacy campaign was
started, designed to indoctrinate the country's illiterate population --
then estimated at 24 percent -- while teaching people to read.
The regime's first minister of education visited Russia, and brought back
ideas on blending education, physical labor and political ideology.
Old textbooks were replaced with ideologically correct new ones. Literature
contrary to Communism was banned, and in its place, students began to read,
analyze and write about Castro's lengthy speeches.
``The concept is to use education as an instrument to create a new man,
whose god is revolution,'' said Luis Zúñiga, director of the human rights
division of the Cuban American National Foundation, author of a booklet on
the Cuban education system titled The Children of Fidel Castro. In 1978, the
government passed the 116-article Code of the Child, which includes
statements on the importance of the Marxist-Leninist formation of children
and on the need for the state to protect children ``against all influences
contrary to their communist formation.''
To many parents, that simply means that the government takes away patria
potestad -- parents' right to choose for their children.
This is one of the fundamental lessons Lázara Brito says her 9-year-old son,
Isaac Cohen, is learning in his Havana elementary: ``Two sets of morality.''
Every day, she says, when Isaac's teacher asks him a politically loaded
question, he gives her the expected answer, while harboring in his heart the
very different values that Brito has taught him at home.
``He tells me `Mommy, I tell her what she wants to hear,''' Brito said.
Brito, wife of Miami resident José Cohen, and their three children -- Isaac,
Yamila, 13, and Yanelis, 16 -- were put in the spotlight during the Elián
González case because they have been denied permission to join Cohen despite
having visas since 1996. The children have been harassed in school because
of the family's decision to leave. Although he is only 9, Isaac, who will
start fourth grade Sept. 1, is an old hand at duplicity by necessity, Brito
said. The boy has gotten one type of education at school, and another one at
home, since he entered state-run pre-school, where children are fed
indoctrination, sometimes literally, as candy.
In one pre-school and kindergarten lesson all Cuban families are familiar
with, the teacher asks students whether they believe God exists. Children
who respond `yes' are asked to close their eyes and ask God for a piece of
candy. When they open their eyes and their hands are empty, the teacher asks
them to close their eyes again. This time, the teacher says, ask Fidel for
the candy.
When they do, the teacher places a piece of candy in each of their hands.
``See,'' the teacher will say, ``there is no God. There is only Fidel.''
Another example from ¡A Leer! (``Let's Read''), the first-grade reading
book, introduces children to a pillar of Cuban education --
anti-Americanism -- through a poem titled Girón, after the embattled beach
in 1961's Bay of Pigs Invasion: April is a very pretty month.
"In April, the flowers bloom.
And April is the month of Girón. One time, in April, the Yankees attacked
us. They sent a lot of bad people.
They wanted to destroy the free Cuba. The people defeated them. Fidel led
the fight."
And these days, Brito said, math word problems are about Cuba's symbolic
lawsuit against the United States. In May, Cuba's government demanded that
the United States pay $121 billion in damages for causing economic harm to
the island through the U.S. trade embargo. Washington has never commented on
the lawsuit.
At the end of the last school year, Isaac brought home a survey that Brito
was supposed to help him fill out. A sampling of the questions:
No. 10: Put the following activities in order, according to your tastes.
Among the choices: pionero campouts, neighborhood watch, neighborhood
clean-up, marches, watching television, attending church, and going to a
disco.
No. 14: Before the Revolution, your school building used to belong to people
who now live in the United States. Now, through the Helms-Burton Law, they
are reclaiming it from over there. What is your opinion about this
situation?
Because indoctrination in schools starts early, parents start
``deprogramming'' children early as well, said Jesús Yanes Pelletier, a
Havana parent and dissident. Yanes has a daughter, 14, and a son, 11, both
in middle school.
``After school, I sit them down and I tell them, `Everything that they
taught you today is a lie,' '' Yanes said. ``It's difficult for parents to
make the time to do it, but we have to.''
MIDDLE SCHOOL
`Country school' often means cheap labor, shabby conditions
But as his daughter Jenny grows up, Yanes says he's had more than skewed
course work to worry about. He dreads her having to attend a so-called
``country school.''
For 45 days, middle and high school students are sent to school/work-camps
in the countryside, where they toil in the fields for half the day, then
attend classes. Other students attend country boarding schools, where
children work and study the entire school year, and can only go home on a
weekend pass.
The idea behind the country schools is to allow the student to develop a
sense of community and teamwork while learning about the country's crops. In
reality, say parents and teachers, it translates into cheap labor in often
shabby conditions -- and an opportunity for children to grow up too fast.
Promiscuity, pregnancies, thefts, smoking and escapes to nearby towns are
common occurrences, said Emilia Ruvira, a former drawing teacher in a Havana
technical high school, now living in Miami.
Ruvira helped supervise a country school as part of her duties.
``The school was a wooden house, like a shed, that had bare cement floors,
outhouses and horrible food,'' she remembered. ``There were six teachers and
some staff there -- 10 people in all to supervise 300 kids. At 15, you want
to discover a lot of things. Almost everybody had sexual relations. And with
contraceptives being over the counter, it was easy.''
That scenario is what Yanes fears her daughter would inevitably be caught up
in.
``My daughter has not and never will she go to la escuela al campo,'' Yanes
said. ``The kids do what they want. Sometimes girls and boys sleep in the
same room, divided by a sheet. Thousands of girls have gotten pregnant -- by
teachers themselves.''
This year, a doctor's note managed to keep Jenny from country school. Next
year, Yanes said, he's going to have to get creative.
Andrés, a photographer who sells his work at the artist market alongside the
Malecón in Vedado, said he has started worrying about it early: His son is
nine months old. When he reaches high school, Andrés and his wife Ana say,
they'll find a doctor to say their boy has a spinal cord problem. ``These
are the tricks we do,'' Andrés said. At 17, Marcos De Miranda, one year away
from graduating college, was thrown out of his Havana high school. The
reason:
``They wanted him to say, in front of all his classmates, that his father
was anti-social,'' said Roberto De Miranda, Marcos' father.
When Marcos, now 21, refused, the elder De Miranda said, ``his grades were
lowered and he was thrown out.''
It was a matter of principle, said Roberto De Miranda, but it was a costly
and bitter consequence -- one that is hard to make his other children, who
have suffered harassment at school, understand.
``My kids tell me, `Dad, we can't study, and it's your fault that we are
languishing,' '' Roberto De Miranda said. ``Then I have to talk to them
about dignity, decorum and principle.'' While he admires his son for
standing up to his beliefs, the elder De Miranda can't help lamenting his
and others' futures being cut short.
``How many kids, how many doctors and engineers have we lost because
although their grades were good, they just didn't fit in politically?''
Certainly, Yanelis Cohen Brito is one.
The 16-year-old last saw the inside of a classroom a year ago, when she
passed ninth grade. It was a bittersweet time -- she'd earned excellent
notes, said her mother, but she was told she couldn't enroll in high school
because her family was planning to leave the country.
Now she sits at home all day, frustrated.
When Yanelis was expelled, school officials called her friends' parents,
telling them they shouldn't let their children associate with Yanelis.
Despite that, children have taken to gathering at the girl's home after
school.
``I hear their conversations and they are full of frustration and anxiety,''
Brito said. But most important, she said, ``they have started to think.''
``My generation was much more successfully indoctrinated,'' said Brito, 40.
``They more than any other generation see the difference between what
they're being taught and real life.''
Andrés, the photographer, shows a picture he took of a young Cuban boy in a
school uniform and Pioneer scarf. Next to the student is an ad picturing a
smiling delivery man holding a package. There is irony in the juxtaposition,
Andrés said. The boy is waiting for something, too -- his package, his
future, much as Andrés himself did, years ago. He said he had the typical
Cuban childhood: he was a Pioneer, worked in the fields, learned how to
shoot and clean a gun and march.
``To be prepared,'' he said, laughing.
For what?
Andrés laughed. ``I don't know.''
Related:
.Human rights and education in Cuba