Axisa and Aron Alfonso, 6- and 7-year-old siblings in western Cuba, are luckier than most of their classmates: Their father takes them on their one-mile commute to school on horseback.<\/p>\n
The children and teachers who live farther away rely on a spluttering, yellow Soviet-era school bus that no longer shows up. Teachers often do not make it to class, so the Alfonso family and their horse, Chocolate, turn around and go home.<\/p>\n
A U.S. oil blockade has set off an increasingly agonizing energy crisis that has brought transportation largely to a standstill. Fewer cars and buses are on the streets, and, as a result, fewer students and teachers are in school.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy children rarely go to school. They go, but the teachers don\u2019t come,\u201d said Sergio Alfonso V\u00e1squez, 33, a farmer and the father of Axisa and Arona. \u201cI\u2019m afraid because they aren\u2019t learning anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
To save energy, the Cuban government in February cut school to half-days and resorted to Covid-era remote learning for college students.<\/p>\n
Then Cuba decided to end the school year two weeks early and scrapped college entrance exams for high school seniors after acknowledging that sleepless nights without electricity and a lack of school meals were exhausting students and teachers alike.<\/p>\n
The Cuban government\u2019s measures are the latest blows to the country\u2019s once vaunted public education system, which had long been a signature triumph of the country\u2019s socialist revolution.<\/p>\n
Schools were already reeling from Hurricane Melissa last fall, which damaged hundreds of buildings; a mass departure of teachers in recent years; and shortages of textbooks, uniforms and even pencils and paper.<\/p>\n
The extreme gasoline shortage finally brought the strained system to a stop.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration\u2019s pressure campaign, including an executive order that prohibited countries from delivering oil to Cuba, is aimed at forcing Cuba\u2019s government into making political and economic changes.<\/p>\n
But experts say the damage to the educational system is a striking example of the negative consequences of U.S. measures on regular Cubans and that, in the case of schools, amounts to a serious long-term threat.<\/p>\n
\u201cEducation in Cuba is at risk due to the current energy crisis,\u201d Anne Lemaistre, the regional director of UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, said on Instagram<\/a>. \u201cIt jeopardizes the future of an entire generation.\u201d<\/p>\n All 240 of Cuba\u2019s boarding schools had to close this semester, Ms. Lemaistre, who is based in Havana, told The New York Times.<\/p>\n The Cuban government did not respond to requests for comment, but government officials have publicly discussed the schools crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter a night without electricity, getting a kid to school, figuring out how to engage him, and the class itself, is a challenge,\u201d Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, Cuba\u2019s minister of education, said in February on state television. \u201cAnd for the teachers, who also suffer just as much, without electricity or with the problem of whether or not they have water at home, concentrating on giving classes has been quite a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Even before the Trump administration started imposing stricter measures against the Cuban government, the country had already been in a steep economic decline for several years.<\/p>\n The Cuban government said the school system was facing a shortage of roughly 26,000 teachers, many of whom had quit for better-paying jobs in the private sector.<\/p>\n In Camag\u00fcey, a city in eastern Cuba, nearly 1,000 teachers had left the country for good in recent years, state-run media reported.<\/p>\n After the Covid-19 pandemic, the country experienced a record-breaking exodus. More than a million people, including thousands of teachers who earned an average of $11 a month, left the country.<\/p>\n President Trump cut off international fuel deliveries in January and introduced a new package of aggressive economic measures aimed at starving the Cuban government of cash.<\/p>\n The Trump administration argues that the United States is not to blame for Cuba\u2019s energy crunch, but instead faults Cuban officials for not investing enough in infrastructure while diverting \u201cenergy resources to line their own pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n The State Department, in a statement, questioned why the Cuban regime claims it has no fuel for schools, while Interior Ministry officials who quash protests have enough gas to carry out their operations.<\/p>\n Remote learning for college students, one of the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government, has proved all but impossible. Blackouts stretch over 20 hours a day, and most students and teachers cannot pay for enough data on their phones to support remote classes.<\/p>\n Instead, professors have sent lessons using WhatsApp voice notes.<\/p>\n Leonard G\u00f3mez Le\u00f3n, a third-year law student at the University of Havana, described the semester as \u201chellish.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe power outages have been constant, the lack of internet connection, and so on, and it\u2019s truly terrifying to see how badly we students are doing,\u201d he said. \u201cI feel like this is almost a lost semester.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. G\u00f3mez, 21, is the vice president of the University Student Federation of Cuba, a state-run organization that has traditionally toed the government line. But he helped organize a protest in March outside the university, demanding the semester be canceled until in-person classes could resume.<\/p>\n