Cool Economy Puts Boys In Shorts

Cuba is cutting pants to cut costs, declaring that it is replacing schoolboys’ slacks with shorts to save cloth.

Cuban fifth- and sixth-graders soon will be issued Bermuda shorts, with hems hitting just below the knees, the communist government said this week.

The Communist Party daily Granma said the measure would allow the government to produce 28,000 more school uniforms for Cuban children for the 1998-99 school year.

The move is among a series of austerity measures Cubans can expect this year as the government struggles to overcome the economic crisis that began almost a decade ago.

The economy shrank by 35 percent between 1989 and 1994 with the collapse of Cuba’s socialist trading partners in Eastern Europe.

While the economy has been growing at a modest rate, the government is looking for additional ways to save money and become more self-sufficient. The school uniform change is part of that strategy.

Cuban officials said in late December that they expect only modest economic growth in 1998, a smaller sugar harvest and continued economic austerity measures.

The party newspaper put a positive spin on the change in school uniforms, saying it better fit with “the actual tendencies of fashion and climate in our country.”

All Cuban children attend government schools and are issued uniforms with white shirts or blouses.

Younger boys receive shorts and older boys wear long pants. Girls wear culottes.