Natalia López Moya, Havana, 14 August 2024 — It is time to prepare school supplies, to wait in long lines to buy the uniforms that students will wear to school in September, but also to start looking for solutions to alleviate one of the most serious problems in Cuban schools: the lack of hygiene and safety in the bathrooms. Girls are the ones who have it the worst.
“I prepare two bottles of water for her, one to drink and one to wash her hands when she goes to the bathroom, but she never uses it,” Dagmara, the mother of a teenager who is in elementary school in Old Havana, told 14ymedio. The girl, who will be entering ninth grade in a few days, has just had a kidney infection that is apparently related to the time she spends without urinating while at school.
“When she was taking her eighth grade final exams, she started to have a high fever and chills,” she explains. “The doctor told us that she was going to need antibiotics and that she seemed to spend a lot of time without drinking water or urinating.” Diannis, her name has been changed for this story, stays in the classroom for more than eight hours a day without going near the toilets. “They have a lot of stench and the doors to the stalls are broken.”
When I have my period I don’t go to school, I spend the whole week at home because I don’t have the conditions to change and clean myself there.”
Diannis describes the bathroom as a place that is best kept away from. “The sinks don’t have water, the toilets are almost always full because there is no way to flush them, sometimes people do their business outside the stalls because they don’t want to go in there, and to top it all off, the doors are broken or have been gone for a long time, so there is no privacy.”
“When I have my period I don’t go to school. I spend the whole week at home because I don’t have the conditions to change and clean myself there,” she admits. “I don’t go to school once a month and several of my friends do the same. The teachers know what it’s about and they don’t say anything to us because having your period at school is very hard. You can’t even wash your hands after changing your pad.”
The directors of the secondary school where Diannis studies know the problem. At every parent meeting, the teachers ask for help cleaning the bathrooms. “One or two of us step forward, we go, we do a deep cleaning and a month later everything is as always: dirty,” admits Dagmara. “Once my husband and I went and even fixed the door of a stall and put a lock and key on it so that the boys in our daughter’s classroom could use it. Shortly afterward we found out that that bathroom was now for ’municipal visits’ from Education and the students could no longer us