CUBAN teachers are to come to work in South Africa to relieve a shortage of qualified staff in the country’s schools, a representative for President Thabo Mbeki said on Saturday. “Cuba will help us fast track an answer to this problem of not having enough qualified teachers by bringing people in,” Bheki Khumalo told e.tv independent television news. South African schools suffered an exodus of teachers in the late 1990s when the government tried to correct the imbalance in the number of teachers employed respectively at black and white schools under apartheid. Many highly qualified staff accepted severance packages and left the profession. But the president of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union criticised the decision, asserting the country still had a pool of unemployed candidates. Cuba already has an agreement to supply South Africa with doctors. In recent years some 400 Cuban doctors have come to work in understaffed clinics in the country’s rural areas. – AFP