Cuba’s education crisis is pulling private businesses into public classrooms, with donations, transport, and newly authorized tutoring helping sustain schooling for 1.5 million students while exposing a troubling gap between the island’s promise of equal opportunity and families’ everyday means.
Before the Lesson Comes Lunch
A school can have children enrolled and still struggle to cook their lunch. That is where Cuba’s education minister, Naima Trujillo, began explaining the difficulties of a school year increasingly dependent on people and businesses outside the state.
“It has been a difficult start,” she told EFE in an exclusive interview, identifying food preparation, supplies, and transportation as the main problems. About 1.5 million students returned to classrooms on September 1. Keeping them there requires much more than opening the doors.
Private businesses have donated food, shoes and clothing. Transport operators have incorporated routes for students and teachers who cannot afford the journey because of distance or family circumstances. Trujillo described support networks extending beyond occasional gestures of generosity.
The distinction matters. A donated meal addresses hunger today; a dependable transport arrangement can protect attendance throughout a term. Fuel shortages, however, threaten the businesses providing that service as well as the public institutions receiving it. These partnerships redistribute scarce resources within the same damaged economy.
Homes for children without parental care have received private help with alternative energy supplies and deteriorating buildings. With power cuts exceeding 20 hours in affected areas, electricity becomes part of the duty of care. Such homes cannot simply transfer every interrupted service back to a parent.
Trujillo acknowledged that school maintenance had previously depended on state budget allocations. The crisis has forced officials to incorporate other sources. For a government that places public education at the center of its social promise, that admission reaches beyond repairs: guaranteeing a service increasingly requires accepting help from outside its own machinery.
A Bigger Market, Uneven Relief
The businesses being asked to help are already central to daily survival. Preliminary official statistics reported in 2025 put the nonstate sector’s share of retail sales of goods and services at 55 percent in 2024, up from 44 percent in 2023, excluding public utilities.
That is an increase of 11 percentage points, or one quarter relative to the earlier share. But it measures sales value, not the quantity of goods sold. Higher private prices can enlarge the sector’s monetary share without producing a comparable increase in the amount families can afford.
This helps explain the educational bargain. Enterprises that can secure supplies can bridge shortages in schools, while the prices that sustain those businesses may remain beyond teachers’ salaries. Donations can move some resources across that divide. They cannot erase the underlying difference in purchasing power.
Nor does growing commercial importance automatically produce equal coverage. A school with dependable business partners may gain transport or repairs sooner than one without them. The interview provides no national accounting of donations or evidence that assistance reaches institutions according to need.
That leaves a practical question for education authorities: how to distribute help without allowing access to generous firms to determine educational opportunity. Stable partnerships offer continuity, but national entitlement requires oversight and funding that survive an individual donor’s changing fortunes.
Private participation can support public education. Its success should therefore be judged by whether children receive reliable services, including in places where charitable contributions are scarce. Counting participating businesses alone would reveal little about who remains stranded.
Teachers Need More Than Thanks
The classroom has its own shortage. Trujillo said gaps in teaching coverage affect roughly five provinces, particularly Havana, where around 3,000 teachers were brought from eastern Cuba to support the current school year. Moving staff fills immediate vacancies while requiring people to reorganize their lives around another community’s needs.
Pay helps explain the strain. Official statistics cited by EFE put monthly education earnings at 5,824 Cuban pesos, placing the sector among the island’s two lowest-paid. EFE valued that at approximately $49 using the formal exchange rate and only $7 using the informal rate.
The sevenfold difference warns against interpreting wages through official conversions. Teachers receive the same pesos under either calculation. Neither dollar figure fully measures household purchasing power, but the disparity exposes how misleading an apparently higher converted salary can be when essential purchases reflect a different exchange market.
September’s tutoring rule addresses part of that problem. Active teachers can now seek authorization to provide private lessons, reversing a prohibition imposed in 2022. “By legalizing it, the dialogue between the school, the family and the tutor is much more open,” Trujillo told EFE.
Extra earnings could help teachers remain in education. Yet paid lessons introduce another test of equality: students’ access to additional instruction depends on what their families can spend. The regulation calls for arrangements that include vulnerable students who cannot pay, making implementation crucial.
The ministry is also pursuing compensation for additional teaching duties and incentives to bring retired educators back. Those measures add more work to available staff; they do not remove the pressures that make teaching hard to sustain.
Asked what the coming months would bring, Trujillo told EFE that prediction was “very difficult” because education follows the country’s circumstances. For families, that uncertainty arrives as ordinary questions: whether transport will come, lunch will be ready, and a teacher will remain. The next morning needs an answer.