As soon as Leonis Pérez González steps through the door of his college dorm, in a tiny city on Cuba's south coast, the tour he's conducting of his temporary home is virtually over.

The place might measure 20 square metres. There's a sink, a tiny plastic table, two sets of bunkbeds, a closet far too small for the belongings of him and three roommates, and a balcony looking onto concrete walkups distinguished from this one by little more than location, each one as blocky, plain and weathered as the next.

Pérez doesn't mind. He has his distractions: weekend trips into the nearby city of Cienfuegos, a portable CD player for listening to salsa and reggae, and keeping up with the struggles of his hometown baseball team of Santiago de Cuba, 670 kilometres to the southeast. "They're young," he explains with a forgiving shrug. "They have a lot of new players."

Really, he's too busy to worry about his cramped quarters anyway. Pérez, 36, is a fourth-period electricity student at the nearby Centro Nacional para la Certificación Industrial (CNCI, or the national centre for industrial certification). "It is a lot of subjects in a small time," he says in confident but limited English. "It is very hard but it is to our benefit."

Already an electrician at a cement company in Santiago, Pérez knows the certification he's getting at CNCI - which meets international standards - will mean a modest pay raise. That's a privilege. "There are others who cannot come here," he says.

In time, they might. Thousands already have.

Once, this remote part of Cuba, roughly 250 kilometres southeast of Havana and overlooking Cienfuegos Bay, was the site of a Soviet attempt to kick-start Cuba's nuclear power infrastructure. Pérez's current hometown, known almost nostalgically as Nuclear City, was originally built to house staff to run the local plant. When its construction was unexpectedly suspended in 1992, a few thousand workers suddenly had no obvious purpose.

That's changed. In the service of Cuba's Ministry of Basic Industry (MINBAS), and through a 10-year partnership with NAIT and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), CNCI has transformed this region into a staging ground for the future of the nation. At home, it has pushed Cuban productivity with a workforce of skilled tradespeople.

But, in a nation politically and economically isolated for more than half a century, it is also creating new - and more importantly, sustainable - opportunities with international partners.

Known by locals only as la escuela, or the school, CNCI is earning a reputation that extends beyond the island's shores - making students like Pérez the face of a country poised for almost unprecedented change, a face Cuba seems ready and eager to put forward to the world.

The road to CNCI

From the nearest big city - bayside, colonial Cienfuegos - the school is a 30-minute drive through an industrial zone skirting the bay and via Avenida Simón Bolivar, a stretch of broken pavement that crumbles into a potholed dirt road.

Near a burgeoning refinery fed with Venezuelan crude, the face of Hugo Chavez dominates a billboard reading, upon translation, "Only socialism can make possible the impossible."

Continuing across the broad, muddy Damují River, the route winds through tangled jungle that reluctantly gives way to tidy mango and avocado groves surrounding the old plant. An empty concrete husk intended as one of four 417-megawatt nuclear reactors, it dominates the horizon like a great, domed cathedral.

Conveniently located nearby - originally a training centre for plant technicians - the school is beige and featureless as an urban prairie high school, circa 1960.

Compared to most national educational institutes, CNCI is oddly isolated, but that's in keeping with the Cuban habit of making the most of what's at hand - a resourcefulness that can bring unexpected strides towards modernization.

Since 2000, when it started with electrical and instrumentation training, the school has been at the heart of a success story in a promising trend in international development: investing in vocational training to build a skilled workforce that not only keeps a country running, but attracts outside investment.

"Cuba, like many developing countries, has a massive gap in technical or industrial training," says Kathryn Dunlop, the CIDA co-operation counsellor stationed in the Canadian Embassy in Havana.

That doesn't mean Cuba is undereducated. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the literacy rate rocketed. At roughly 99.8 per cent today, it beats both Canada and the U.S., each at 99 per cent.

Overall, however, Cuban post-secondary education is concentrated in universities. CNCI, with NAIT's assistance, has helped catalyze a vital shift, "raising the profile and reputation of technical training," says Dunlop. "In terms of our sustainable economic growth priority, CIDA is working with Cuba to build foundations for the future. One of the foundations for economic growth is a modern workforce and that's where CNCI comes in."

So does NAIT, says CNCI director Hugo Longoria del Blanco. "When we talk about CNCI development during the last 10 years, we have to talk about NAIT involvement."

Specifically, Longoria refers to instructor training provided by NAIT instructors - on-site and in Edmonton - and shipments of equipment including metal lathes, computers, electrical and instrumentation simulation panels, numerical control machines and more - worth more than $3 million over the last decade. Without it, the school's labs and shops couldn't operate.

"The base of our technical training at CNCI has to be a practical training," says Longoria. "The most important issue is to provide the students the opportunity to do the things with their own hands."

Ultimately, this approach means a better, faster and safer workforce, he adds. That's exactly what CIDA wants to see come out of its promotion of vocational training. What's more, Longoria adds, "It's something employers are recognizing."

Energy Revolution

There's subtle gravity in that statement.

Frame it in the likelihood of a post-embargo Cuba and the economic acceleration that might follow, and it suggests an acknowledgement of the need to prepare for a future the Revolution likely didn't anticipate.

Longoria - who bears a striking resemblance to Cuban hero José Martí, leader in the late-19th century fight for independence from Spain - seems ready for whatever change might come.

He's already seen a lot since he came to this part of the country in the early 1980s as an engineer to operate the nuclear power plant.

Back then, the Soviet Union played big brother here; its nuclear plant project was sustaining a workforce of thousands. In short, the future depended heavily on the agenda of a communist superpower.

In 1991, of course, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. A few boxes of outdated nuclear physics textbooks, printed in Cyrillic, are the only remnants of the previous inhabitants of the training centre, its classrooms and open-air corridors filled today with early- and midcareer Cubans.

After the school started in 2000 by offering electrical and instrumentation courses to about 80 students, recalls Longoria, it moved into welding in 2001 and mechanical and millwright training in 2002. From there, it offered certification to supervisors, welding inspectors and, today, inspectors of high-risk equipment including pressure vessels, boilers, valves and piping.

It will even tailor programs to suit specific employers and train on-site, according to needs identified by MINBAS.

Overall, more than 16,400 students have graduated from CNCI over the last decade, with roughly 1,200 achieving international certification based on NAIT and Alberta curriculum.

But the best example of the change the school represents might be the role it played in the Energy Revolution. Starting in 2006, the national campaign addressed not only a deteriorating power grid, but the need to move toward sustainable energy sources. Thousands of small, fuel oil-powered generators known as gensets tackled the former, if not the latter.

To help with their rapid rollout across Cuba, the school developed its own curriculum and trained nearly 6,000 operators and maintenance technicians.

The machines may be little more than a bandage solution, but the immediate outcome has been positive. Besides proving the school's burgeoning self-sufficiency, the genset rollout, for now, has addressed the crippling energy deficit, opening up the country to a world of economic possibilities.

"Energy is the base of the development of modern society," says Longoria. But he's mindful of taking too much credit. "The Energy Revolution is huge. We were only able to provide a piece of sand in that bigger picture. But we are really proud."

Boosting productivity

Back in Havana, the officers of MINBAS, one of Cuba's most powerful ministries, pay close attention to progress and achievements at the school.

"One of the key points of the Revolution has been education for the Cuban people," says Daysi Pineda Sánchez.

As the Ministry of Basic Industry's vice minister, Pineda oversees 120,000 workers and seven industry-related schools, CNCI among them.

With respect to realizing Cuba's economic potential, education has continued to play a central role in the country. "One of the key focuses of the training at CNCI is not only to help prepare operators and maintenance people for industry, but to increase productivity."

Boosting productivity is a priority of the Cuban government, and it can happen in two ways. The first is to realize the better, faster, safer workforce of Longoria's aims. The second - especially important given the government's announcement last September of 500,000 state worker layoffs - is to attract more foreign investors (that is, new employers).

That might seem contradictory to the nationalization of foreign and domestic privately owned businesses following the Revolution. But today, the government considers carefully managed international partnerships necessary for growth.

A good example sits right down the road from the school: the oil refinery, currently ramping up as a joint venture with Petróleos de Venezuela SA. Training that facility's staff ranks high amongst the school's next projects.

"Foreign investment is important to the development of the Cuban economy," says Arnoldo Rodríguez Lubían, specialist with the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Investment. "With the development of [CNCI] it will be possible that the workers needed by foreign investors could be covered with the Cuban workforce. That's good not only for Cuba but also for the foreign countries that invest here."

"Ten years ago the country and the government were struggling to find men and women who were prepared to go out into industry and work," says Pineda. "The co-operation programs with NAIT have been integral to helping prepare these workers."

They have also had a beneficial regional effect. In addition to boosting Cuban productivity, CNCI helps other Latin American countries do the same by serving as a training centre for foreign workers. A source of ongoing revenue, such outreach is further proof of the institute's sustainability.

Development projects are temporary. But the gains made by CNCI are sustainable and long term, says Kathryn Dunlop, who is optimistic about the future of the school, which recently spun off a new project (also in partnership with NAIT) to strengthen the technical training system across Cuba.

In CNCI's favour, she sees support from the Cuban government, especially MINBAS, and signifi cant capacity to meet emerging needs. Most importantly, perhaps, she sees graduates that are better off for the experience.

"CNCI, with the support of NAIT, has given them the skills," says Dunlop. "Wherever they work, they take those skills with them."

Individual impact

Fourth-period electricity student Maréa Gámez Lambert recognizes the value of those skills in a way foreign to most Canadians.

An employee of a power plant in Havana, the 54-year-old mother of two daughters - a teacher and a biomedical engineer - is learning about circuits and transformers, and how to read plans and meet Canadian codes and standards.

In a society so intensely focused on equality, she's not getting an education to get ahead. She's becoming a better contributor, just like she taught her daughters.

"For me, the most important thing is to be useful," says Gámez, "not to go through life without any inspiration or without giving something to society."

A generation removed from Gámez, Leonis Pérez González shares that sentiment. Soon, he'll leave his tiny, Nuclear City dorm room and return to bustling Santiago de Cuba. He'll resume work as an electrician at a cement plant, probably taking on more responsibility and receiving a raise of perhaps 125 pesos, bringing his monthly wage to roughly $20.

But, like Gámez, the extra money isn't the point of attending the school. "The world is developing," says Pérez. "You can't get stuck. You have to move with the world."

He's talking about his own skill set, but he might as well be talking about his country. As Cuba continues to reach out to international partners - corporations, countries and institutes like NAIT - its circumstances require it to prove it has kept pace with the world. By producing a growing body of skilled alumni, CNCI is one way Cuba is doing that.

"It's hard for one person to move a stone," says Pérez. "When there are more, you can do it. It's collective work."