Cuban President visits center for people with disabilities

Havana, Oct 14 (Prensa Latina) Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel today visited La Castellana psycho-pedagogical home, a facility specialized in taking care of people with disabilities, in the municipality of Arroyo Naranjo in Havana.

According to the presidential Twitter account, that social institution was a private clinic, whose owners came from the Spanish region of Castilla y Leon. Following the triumph of the revolution, the government turned it in 1963 into a caring institution for people with special educational needs.

During a meeting at the Palace of the Revolution prior to the referendum on the Family Code, Diaz-Canel shared with people affectionately linked to that legal instrument and promised its director Marileidys Perdomo he would visit the facility.

With a current enrollment of 290 patients, 90 of them inmates, the center provides the services free of charge and, from the pedagogical point of view, the students learn basic activities for their development, such as eating, articulating language and identifying sounds.

In La Castellana, one of the 28 existing centers of its type in Cuba for the care of children, teenagers and adults with intellectual disabilities in their most severe forms, the staff is constantly seeking methods and ways to improve its teachings.

Its mission is the integration of patients into the family and social environment, based on work in areas devoted to cognitive stimulation, sensory-perceptual, body rehabilitation, music therapy and art therapy, among others.