A video posted on Facebook by the user Luli Hernandez shows the state of neglect of the pre-university institution in the area known as Sanguilí 1, and has sparked a wave of reactions among Cubans both on the island and abroad.
In the 49-second clip, Hernandez walks through the center's facilities and describes what he sees in few words: "There aren't even stairs".
The images show empty hallways and a deteriorating infrastructure that contrasts with the memories of those who spent years of their adolescence in centers like that.
The neglect of the Institutos Preuniversitarios en el Campo (IPUEC) is not a recent phenomenon, but rather the result of decades of decisions made by the Cuban regime.
At its peak expansion, Cuba had around 350 IPUEC and 1,400 Basic Secondary Schools in the Field, where adolescents aged 14 to 18 alternated classes with up to 90 days of agricultural work per year.
The dismantling began in 2009, when the government started the gradual elimination of pre-university scholarships without providing public explanations. In 2011, the 148th Guide of the Communist Party formalized the reduction of interns by acknowledging that students were not producing enough to justify the costs of the model.
By 2018, most of the centers had been converted into housing for workers, self-sustaining farms, or remained as true ghost towns.
Documented cases of deterioration are accumulating: the IPVCE Carlos Marx in Matanzas was reported to be in a state of abandonment in November 2022; the Lenin Vocational School in Havana was experiencing vandalism and invasive vegetation in January 2023; an IPUEC in Pinar del Río was converted into a quail farm in July 2023; and a pedagogical branch in Artemisa appeared surrounded by weeds in January 2025.
The video of Sanguilí 1 falls within a trend of testimonies that document that collapse and evoke nostalgia among those who experienced those spaces as part of their upbringing.
In March 2026, the poem "Where Are They, Boys?", by the Cuban Ángel Martínez Niubó, reached over 601,000 views on Facebook as it evoked the hallways, classrooms, dormitories, and courts of the now-ruined IPUECs. The poem concluded with a question that resonated with thousands of Cubans: Tell me where they are, boys, and why I am still here looking for them. A resident in Houston who reacted to the poem summed up the collective sentiment with a phrase: "They have destroyed everything, it's unbelievable."
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