AT THE end of October, I and 18 other members of the NEU including its current president Ed Harlow and former general secretary Kevin Courtney,  travelled to Cuba as part of an international solidarity delegation in partnership with Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC).  

We visited all sectors of the Cuban education system: primary, secondary, specialist and higher education. It was an immense privilege to travel with so many incredible and diverse colleagues and to have met so many truly inspirational Cuban people.

When we arrived on a blustery October evening in Havana, the first thing we noticed was the heat and humidity. At 34°C it was hotter than last year and this was to be a significant factor in our visit as Hurricane Melissa bore down on neighbouring Jamaica — it became the third-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record.

Our tour guide Yani cautioned us that Melissa could be a factor in our visit and we would have to remain flexible. As it transpired Melissa devastated Jamaica and flattened large parts of eastern Cuba, which was far from our itinerary.

What surprised me was how the whole island mobilised to alleviate the devastation and ensure the safety of fellow citizens, with zero help from its largest neighbour just 90 miles across the water.

Thankfully our flight home was undisturbed as Melissa flounced out to the north.

At Hotel Inglaterra in Havana we saw first hand how the illegal and cruel US blockade operated to create scarcities in equipment, sanitation, power and even food across the whole of Cuba.

Havana is a stunning historical city with obvious and severe decay as its currency is forced into hyperinflation and government pay is devalued to the point of absurdity: a relentless and vicious campaign to force what Donald Trump and his acolytes like to call “regime change.”

Our delegation burst into action on Sunday morning in the hotel, filling nine suitcases with pens, pencils, guitar strings, books and art supplies for distribution to each of the schools (urban and rural) we would visit during our five-day trip.

Felipe Poey School on Monday morning was typical of many we would see.  

A young, black, Cuban principal and smartly dressed, happy children turned out to welcome us with the Cuban flag and show us around classrooms that reminded me of my early childhood in the 1960s.

Little technology, old-fashioned paired wooden desks laid out in lines, with wall displays produced by the children and even pen-holders and bookstands homemade from papier mache. All done with five Cuban pesos. The children’s work was beautifully neat.

In the Abel Santa Maria School for the Blind we watched a tiny boy of about six produce words on a Braille typewriter as his 83-year-old teacher stroked his cheek with her finger to direct his attention.  

He read what he typed proudly to us from fingertips, to brain, to tongue. When we let him hold the “photo-op” Braille machine, he did not want to release it from his grasp as he felt how new it was compared to the ancient one he had been using.

Our NEU districts kindly furnished 12 of these machines for the blind schools at £350 each.

There is always something emotional about seeing and hearing students play classical music to a brilliant standard. After visiting Manuel Samel Music School, our delegation left with a collective lump in the throat after posing on the steps for photographs with the students, staff and parents.  

Children as young as 12 played piano, flute and violin for us. We saw this amazing talent for music and dance replicated in the rural area of Pinar del Rio at another performing arts school, whose alumni included Carlos Acosta.

Even more moving was the Con Amor y Esperanza/With Love and Hope community project for people with Down syndrome in Havana, where amazing dance and visual art was on offer. Parents, staff and students worked together here in a powerful collaboration that we will never forget.

Yes, we did the American classic car taxi tour and sampled cigars and local hospitality, as any tourists would, but we were not just sightseers; we were there on behalf of an NEU project to experience Cuba in depth, and we certainly did.  

There were power outages, food shortages, beggars and rubbish fly-blown in the city streets. But there was also a great pride in the revolution and its leaders who stared down from every classroom and office wall in every school.  

There was most importantly the “Pedagogy of Tenderness.” All of Cuba adopts this approach to learning. Cuban education is a means of humanisation and liberation, both individually and collectively, whether through arts, sciences or technology.  

Students at the Pedagogical University spoke with passion about defending the revolution and our guide told us fiercely that Cubans would never consent to a US recolonisation that promised only drugs, gambling and prostitution, from one end of their beautiful island to the other.

Back in the schools, principals shook their heads sadly when we asked them about informal improvement plans, data measurement for rankings and competition, or punitive inspection visits.  

They seemed genuinely mystified by these things. In SEN (special education needs) provision, Cuba operates a system of central diagnosis hubs where students have additional needs identified and are allocated specialist support staff who appear in schools alongside regular teachers.

There are behavioural units where students go for temporary intervention before returning to mainstream.

We were told by the principal in Felipe Poey: “We talk to them, find out what is going wrong and work together with the families to put it right.”

In our country, we patiently explained, we waited until families were broken on the wheel of trauma, poverty, drugs and insecurity before we acted and how resources were slow to arrive, expensive to procure and often on a privatised contractual basis.  

Many of us in hotel conversations acknowledged that our society and its educational system are broken beyond repair after 40 years of neoliberal decline.  

We have huge resources and a fully developed capitalist economy. Yet there are large swathes of our children and educators in severely deprived areas who are treated with anything but tenderness.

We concluded that a new social contract in Britain is long overdue.

Cuba has rigour and tenderness at its educational heart. In order to progress from the morass of teacher retention crises, pupil disengagement and inequality of outcomes, we will have to locate that tenderness in our hearts and begin to use it again.  

The only route towards it is to make our education free again, not only financially free at the point of use, but free of its ideological entrapment in the corrosive notions of neoliberal choice and competition.

A failed ideology that has brought our state education to its knees in so many parts of our nation.

Cuba spends around 10 per cent of GDP on education, as opposed to about 4 per cent which Britain does.

We could achieve something truly transformational in British society by emulating Cuba. This is a dream educators still cherish and one we pledge to fight for collectively as NEU members.

Long live education!

If you are interested in applying to international delegations, or work in education and want to join a union please enquire at neu.org.uk. If you wish to support Cuba Solidarity Campaign you can join at cuba-solidarity.org.uk.