This photograph shows four devoted Kindergarten teachers with their charges on an excursion to a park in Cienfuegos in 1941. The teachers include my great aunt Olga Sotolongo (second and tallest adult from left) and her cousin Silvia “Chacha” Suárez del Villar (first adult on the right). Like many women of the middle classes who chose not to marry, they survived by making the most of their education and joining Cuba’s expanding public school system as teachers. Unlike private schools which became increasingly segregated by class and therefore by race in the 1940s-50s, public schools preserved the anti-racist meritocratic aspirations on which the Cuban Republic was founded. Standing at the very front in overalls is my four-year-old uncle Julián and my always intellectually precocious two-year-old mother Luisa. Cienfuegos, 1940.
