Education Tour?

1979: Can you imagine going on a tour billed "Education in Cuba" and it was school vacation week in Cuba?  All the schools were closed.  Another woman who had as much or more "hutzpah" than I, joined me in sneaking into an Educational Training School and we learned that many teachers had left Cuba.  To fill the vacancies, a project emerged  to train a "brigade" of bright students who had completed the 8th grade to become teachers.  ( I think it was 8th grade, but if someone reads this and knows for sure, please let me know!)

More than 10 years later, one of those students who was completing his college degree while teaching, turned up in one of the classes I taught.  I had been invited to Cuba to upgrade English teachers' skills, and I overheard him mention that brigade.

Stay tuned for more!  

From Havana A Novel - Just Publshed!

Great news!

From Havana A Novel begins in the "Special Period" in Cuba and goes on to tell stories never before published.

To get your copy - either paper back or E book - please go to Amazon.com at: https://www.amazon.com/Havana-Bette-Steinmuller-ebook/dp/B083TH28B6/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bette+steinmuller&qid=1579204473&sr=8-1

The Beginning of my Relationship with Cuba

In the spring of 1959, my grandparents surprised my mom, dad and me with our first TV, a 25-inch Magnavox, for my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  Fidel Castro was in the United States and the first channel I flipped on showed his visit to Harlem and to the United Nations in New York.  Was I ever fascinated by this outspoken revolutionary speaking live on TV!  He wore fatigues and had a beard like my "bohemian" brother.  He was “liberating” a place I knew about because of my aunts’ and uncles’ gambling in the early 1950s on overnight boats to Havana.  But it wasn’t until twenty years later that I went to Cuba the first time for a week and came back convinced that I had visited paradise.