A Cuban identified as Tania Peña Osorio posted on Facebook videos of the facilities of her former pre-university school in the countryside, the «Escuela 14 de Junio», sparking a wave of nostalgia and outrage among thousands who also attended similar institutions.
The most viral video of Tania Peña has accumulated over 84,000 views and 201 comments on Facebook, where the author walks through the hallways, the laundry area, and the showers of the girls' shelter, where everything is in ruins.
"Good morning my loves, here I show you our beloved June 14. How many of you have not been here? I am also fulfilling a request from one of my biology teachers who wrote to me and told me to come," Tania recounts at the beginning of the tour.
In a second video of the seventh-grade shelter, the author recalls one of the most common hardships: the lack of water.
"Here are the showers, always remembering that when there was no water, my friend, we knew where to go. To the reservoir, to take our nice little bath. That's how we managed during the day. The next day, we had to wait and see when the water truck would arrive or when it wouldn’t show up," he describes with a mix of humor and resignation.
The videos of Tania are part of a viral trend that in 2026 has reignited the debate about the abandonment of the Pre-University Institutes in the Countryside (IPUEC) and the Basic Secondary Schools in the Countryside (ESBEC), centers that at their peak totaled approximately 350 IPUEC and nearly 1,400 ESBEC across the island.
In these centers, adolescents aged 14 to 18 combined academic classes with up to 90 days annually of agricultural work, adhering to the Marxist principle of linking education with labor in the fields.
The Cuban regime began the dismantling of these centers in 2009, arguing that students were not producing enough to justify operational costs, a decision formalized by Guide 148 of the Communist Party in 2011.
By 2018, most of the IPUEC had been converted into housing for workers, self-sustaining farms—such as a quail farm in Pinar del Río—or simply left abandoned.
The phenomenon is not new in 2026. On April 15th, Cubans lamented the abandonment of the Sanguilí 1 pre-university after a video by Luli Hernández showed empty hallways, a lack of stairs, and severely deteriorated infrastructure, with the comment "they have destroyed everything."
In March, the poem "Where Are the Boys?" by writer Ángel Martínez Niubó, which evokes nostalgia and abandonment of these schools, surpassed 601,000 views on Facebook.
The deterioration is not limited to rural pre-university schools. The Lenin Vocational School in Havana is also in ruins, ravaged by vandalism and invasive vegetation, according to previous reports.
The pattern repeats across the island: facilities that trained entire generations of Cubans, now reduced to rubble or repurposed for uses unrelated to education, while the abandonment of primary schools is also progressing in municipalities like Nuevitas.
The conditions that Tania Peña describes in her videos—lack of water, dependence on water trucks, bathrooms in reservoirs—are not just memories of difficult times: they reflect the structural deficiencies that have always characterized these centers, even when they were still operational.
Filed under: