One of the professors in charge of this difficult subject is Osniel Urquijo González, who, in spite of his youth —24 years old—already accumulates remarkable career in teaching.
He recalls that “when I was a child I did notI like sports. My father was an athlete from a School for Sports Initiation (EIDE),he played baseball. He wanted me to get where he could not. He was guiding me. First I went through a lot of sports: judo wrestling, rowing, until I discovered that the one I liked was volleyball.
“I was short for the sport and I had to make a big effort. When I finished high school I had very high scores, more than 99, and I was in the first places on the scale. My professors wanted me to do the test to enter the Vladimir Ilich Lenin Vocacional Institute of Exact Sciences to become a lawrer, an engineer or a doctor later.
“But I did not study enough and I got low scores in the test, so I was disqualified. As a teenager I was not sure what I wanted to do. Everybody around me was giving advices, but everybody told me something different. Finally I was interested in physical education and sports, particularly in Psychology”.
Osniel entered a course of Physical Education and Psycology in the Provincial School of Physical Education of Mulgoba, where at 16 I was student assistant and was giving classes. In that center he began his working life. “My parents said to me: ‛A technician in Physical Education? No way at all. And with those scores? You must go to college”, he remembers smiling.
“I found my true vocation, and I do not regret. If I had the possibility of chosing a profession again, I would have chosen this one, in which I feel extremely proud; first, due to the complexity it has, because it allows to know man from diverse angles. Sometimes the Physical Education professor is very questioned by educators of other fields of knowledge; even when he arrives at a school there are some that look him or her over the shoulder. But that happens because they do not know his or her work.
“Studying Physical Education nowadays is a way to be realised professionally and to demonstrate we are very valuable professionals, because of the knowledge of many sciences we must use to teach a boy how to dribble, to throw, to run, and be a better human tomorrow. We did not only create physical abilities, but also values, thoughts and very many characteristics of personality”, Osniel explains.
As young as his students, but with experience
Despite his youth, Osniel accumulates already a certain experience in the educational field: “At 18, I was giving classes of Psycology and Pedagogy to a group of inmates during six months, with the purpose of preparing them for the Olympic Games of prisoners that are held annually in Havana. I had the pleasure of one of them, when he was released, majored in Physical Culture in the university center in his municipality”.
Regarding the difficulties of working with his contemporary ones, he points out: “Working with students of my age, and sometimes even older than me, I have had many enriching pedagogical experiences. For example, the students I had in the Provincial Physical Education School were high performance athletes, and at the beginning some of them rejected me. But little by little, ‛squeezing‘ here and concerning by their problems there, I was getting closer to them; later I tutored some of those controversial boys for their works of diploma, and nowadays many are trainers in the School for Sports Initiation and the Superior Schools for Athlete improvement (ESPA).
But without question, the climax in Osniel´s career is now his work as a professor of Psychology and Psychology Applied to Sports in the EIEFD: “At this moment I have students of 34 countries, except of Australia and Europe. During this course I worked in seven groups, three of fourth year studied Psychology applied to Sports.
“At the beginning my students doubted I could contribute, with my little experience, to their professional training., but later they changed their minds. In the end they wrote to me some phrases hat touched me very much, I still keep them.
“We managed to creat a student scientific circle weith more than 20 young people, who at the moment are doing some researches in the field of Psychology of Sports and have attend international events.
“Also it was important for me to iexchange with them, and to know their cultures and traditions As the school is unique, unique is the experience you acquire working there”.
A young man 101 percent Cuban
That is the way this young university professor describes himself. He is also secretary of Young Communist League of Cuba in the department of Applied Sciences and head of the brigade of solidarity with Cuba made up of students.
He also speaks about his likings: “I spend my free time listening to music; I like a lot Silvio Rodríguez, Buena Fe., the Charanga Habanera. I love to dance, to go out, to have fun with my friends and my girlfriend (she studies Library Sciences and Sciences of Information).
Osniel has also got municipal and provincial important prizes in several editions of the Science and Technology Forum, and was awarded in the 2007 National Forum for the multimedia “Psychology accesible for you”, generalized today in all the country.
As a result of his researching on stress in sports, sports and senior citizens, and the athlete´s behavior under strong physical loads, he atended international congresses as Sport for All (2005), the Ninth International Summit on Physical Education and School Sports (2007) and the First Congress of Children´s Psychomobility (2007).
In 2009 the Council of State gave him the "Builders of the Future" pin, the highest decoaration given to young Cuban researchers, and he has been chosen as best worker at municipal and provincial levels.
This instructor professor, graduated with honors in the Commander Manuel Fajardo University of Physical Culture Sciences and Sports in 2004-2009, has very precise ideas on the relevance of teaching:
“Teaching is a difficult profession, and in these times it is much more difficult still. If education does not walk with the times, the student remains behind the times. There are phrases of eminent educators that are always with me. Of them I remember the one that says that schools have to become places where they not only teach, but also where men are prepared to face the world, the life in a general sense.
“In the International School of Physical Education and Sports it is three times hard, because the Cuban student lives the Cuban reality, he laughs, he suffers, he cries with you, he has your same problems. But the students in the EIEFD come from capitalist countries, with habits, values and customs different from our model. This requires the professor has a certain level of preparation”.
Osniel´s message to other Cuban young people like him cannot be clearer:
“I would like to tell them that in life things are reached with great efforts and great sacrifices; that they must fight and always try to reach their goals even if they find many obstacles. Also they should always defend the Revolution, and to trust our leaders, because they trust us a lot. That everyone from his or her trench (the factory, the furrow in the field, the military unit, the university, the sport fields) feels pride of being a Cuban.
And in the end, a request: “Please, if it there is some space left, I would wish to mention something very important to me: I was born when my parents were hardly 15 years old. My father´s parents raised me, Rolando and Adelaida are their names. Everything I am today I owe to the education they gave me; if it rained, they put me a raincoat on and sent me to school. They did not go to the university —they threaded tobacco leaves in the tobacco plantations of Pinar del Río — but they are my paradigm”.
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