The rector of the Central University "Marta Abreu" of Las Villas (UCLV), Dr. C. Luis Antonio Barranco Olivera, confirmed this Sunday that second and third-year students will not have in-person classes on campus until January 2027, more than four months after the formal start of the academic year.
The announcement was recorded in a video published by UCLV on Facebook to mark the start of the first in-person session for new incoming students. In the message, the rector described the staggered schedule adopted for the 2026-2027 academic year: "In just a few minutes, first-year students will arrive for their initial in-person period, in November the senior students will join, and in January the second and third-year students will come."
This fragmented organization into blocks is not an isolated decision, but rather a reflection of the economic crisis, particularly of fuel, that currently affects education across the country. The Ministry of Higher Education confirmed that the academic year began on the first of September with hybrid and remote learning schemes depending on the availability of resources in each region.
Power outages exceed 20 hours daily in many areas of the Island, and the exodus of teachers to the private sector or abroad further worsens the situation.
The pattern is repeated in other higher education institutions. The University of Oriente has adopted a decentralized model that connects students to training scenarios in their own municipalities. The University of Sancti Spíritus, for its part, began the academic year with a primarily hybrid scheme for regular daytime students, which combines digital platforms and municipal university centers with periods of in-person concentration. The official newspaper Escambray itself acknowledged that this modality represents a significant challenge for the university faculty.
On September 3rd, Miguel Díaz-Canel presided over the national ceremony marking the start of the academic year at the University of Matanzas and defended the reopening of classrooms despite the conditions. "The most revolutionary thing is to start the academic year under these conditions; and we are not starting a semester out of obligation: we are starting it because we are convinced that this semester, under these circumstances, can even be of higher quality," he stated.
The president also urged university students as if it were a different context: "Do not use any shortcomings we may have as an excuse to justify a lack of knowledge or educational results." In the same event, the Minister of Higher Education, Walter Baluja García, announced that more than 40,000 new students are joining the 2026-2027 academic year.
The accumulated crisis has other milestones that illustrate its depth. In March 2026, students protested on the steps of the University of Havana due to the conditions in which they had to continue their studies.
In May, the government suspended the entrance exams for higher education that were scheduled for June and mandated that the allocation of university programs would be based on the cumulative academic index from the pre-university level, an exceptional measure that had not been implemented since the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In welcoming the first-year students who arrived this Sunday at the Santa Clara campus, the rector concluded his message with a phrase that contrasts with the reality faced by most of his students: "Welcome to this humanist, academic, and scientific university. I count on you to continue building it from a place of excellence, because it will remain a very innovative, diverse, and fundamentally ours university."
For second and third-year students, that welcome will have to wait until January.
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