The Isle of Youth began the 2026-2027 school year with just 72.2% teacher coverage, as acknowledged by the state agency ACN, making the shortage of teachers the main educational challenge in the region, where over 11,000 students attend 84 institutions.
The municipal director of Education, Ena Nilvia Reyes, acknowledged the difficulties but assured that organizational measures were adopted to prevent disruptions to the teaching process and to ensure that no student is left without receiving classes.
The deterioration is progressive: at the end of the last school year, the teaching coverage in the area was 79%, a level that already forced a reorganization of human resources and the network of schools.
As a result of this reorganization, out of the 28 alternative classrooms that operated last year, only 17 remain in the current course, staffed by 72 reallocated teachers to ensure the continuity of learning, mainly in primary education, basic secondary education, and Technical and Professional Education.
School transportation adds another unresolved issue: the director herself acknowledged that this aspect "continues to be perfected," a phrase that in practice describes a problem without a solution in sight, just like in 2022, when children from rural areas were unable to attend classes due to lack of transportation.
The crisis also extends into the future: enrollment in pedagogical programs in the area is far below what is needed. To date, only 86 students have joined these programs against a target of 125, which suggests that the deficit will not be resolved in the short term.
The problem of the Isle of Youth is not an exception but rather a reflection of the national educational crisis. Cuba began this school year with a teacher coverage of 73% at the national level and a deficit of approximately 24,000 teachers, leaving over 380,000 students without an assigned lead teacher, according to Infobae.
Camagüey started the school year with coverage of only 68.7% and a deficit of nearly 3,000 teachers to accommodate more than 95,000 students, while Holguín reported a shortage of over 2,000 teachers at the beginning of the school year.
The Minister of Education, Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, acknowledged that the school year began under very difficult conditions, although the regime has attempted to present the emergency measures —the reintegration of retirees, university students as teachers, and teachers with workloads across multiple schools— as structural solutions.
Behind the exodus of teachers are insufficient salaries in the face of inflation, massive migration, and the movement of professionals to the private sector—factors that no emergency measures have been able to reverse.
Reyes concluded his assessment with a phrase that encapsulates the magnitude of the problem: "The success of the course will depend on the efforts of teachers and administrators, as well as the support of families and the community, in a context where the shortage of teachers remains the primary challenge."
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