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The EIDE Lino Salabarría, the School for Sports Initiation in Sancti Spíritus, announced this Sunday that its students must return from the break "on their own," according to a notice published on Facebook by Yayabo Deportivo, the official page of INDER in the province.
The rather brief announcement highlights that the institution cannot ensure transportation for its own students after the break, a responsibility that has historically fallen on the Cuban regime.
The students of the EIDE are young athlete boarders from various municipalities in the province and rely on state transportation for their commutes.
The expression "by their own means" implies that each student and their family must figure out how to get to the school, regardless of where they live or how far away they are, in a country where public transportation is paralyzed and the private sector is forbidden from operating passenger routes.
The notice comes amid a fuel crisis impacting Cuban schools since early 2026.
In Matanzas, the shortage of diesel and gasoline prevented more than 90,000 students from reaching 504 schools.
At the university level, 7,879 scholarship students were relocated to their municipalities due to a lack of fuel, and assessments were adjusted for 176,579 students across 107 programs.
The situation is not new for Sancti Spíritus. Back in September 2020, during the reopening after the pandemic, the intermunicipal transport in Sancti Spíritus was restored to only 50% capacity to allow the return of students from the EIDE, highlighting the chronic logistical difficulties of the system.
The critical conditions in Cuban schools have worsened in the past year, with facilities facing shortages of transportation, food, and maintenance in multiple provinces.
The EIDE Lino Salabarría has national significance: it was designated as the host for the 60th National School Games and received an investment of approximately five million pesos to prepare its facilities for the event.
Sancti Spíritus competed in 24 of the 33 sports held in that edition.
However, the investment in infrastructure contrasts with the inability to ensure the basic transportation of students.
The Cuban budget for sports in 2026 allocates only 8,274 million Cuban pesos, equivalent to about 20,200 dollars, a figure insufficient to sustain the logistical operations of these institutions on a national scale.
The collapse of school transportation is part of the general decline that affects the return to classes in Cuba, where families across the country face each new school year or post-vacation return without guarantees of transportation for their children.
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