A mother has reported the physical abuse her 14-year-old son endured at the hands of a teacher, who allegedly struck him multiple times at a secondary school in the Regla municipality of Havana.
Katysleydys Izquierdo took to social media on Tuesday to expose the physical aggression inflicted by a Labor Education teacher at Julio Antonio Mella Secondary School on her son, who is a student there. In a video posted on Facebook, she recounted being summoned by one of her son's teachers because he had "done something." Upon arriving at the school, her son revealed that the teacher had hit him. "I asked the other children in the class, and they confirmed that the teacher had struck him on several occasions," the mother disclosed.
"I cannot comprehend how a grown man, a teacher, can punch, bruise, or shake a 14-year-old child," she said, outraged. She explained that the teacher had punched her son in the arm and had physically assaulted him multiple times.
Before turning to social media, Izquierdo visited Police Station number 13 in Regla to file a formal complaint, but her effort was futile. The officers refused to take her complaint, claiming that it was not valid because there were no visible injuries. "This is why we are in the state we're in; the police station says it doesn't proceed because there are no injuries," she criticized.
Izquierdo also went to the offices of the Municipal Directorate of Education, where they informed her that they would "evaluate the situation to determine what had happened," according to her account. "Nothing ever happens; in this country, nothing ever happens," she stated, questioning if she would need to assault the teacher for there to be injuries, so her son's case would be taken seriously.
Frustrated by the lack of action, the mother addressed the teacher directly in her video, challenging him with insulting words to come to her home and hit her instead. Izquierdo declared in another post that she would not wait more than five days for a response and expressed her hope that the teacher would be expelled "for hitting and threatening a minor."
As of the publication of this note, the Cuban mother had not provided further details on the case.
Previous Incidents of Teacher Violence in Cuba
In May of this year, Cubans were outraged by an incident where a teacher beat a five-year-old child with a toy machete, causing lung injuries that required specialized medical attention in a hospital in Sancti Spíritus. Only after the family reported the case to the Ministry of Education in Havana did the General Directorate of Education in Yaguajay, the municipality where the assault took place, initiate an investigation. The teacher was subsequently sanctioned with a transfer to another position under different working conditions for a year.