Laura Wernet-Paskel

Early Life and the Island She Called Home

Laura Simona Paskel was born on February 18, 1911, in the sun-baked village of Santa Cruz, on the southern coast of Aruba — a small, arid island in the southern Caribbean that had been under Dutch colonial administration for nearly three centuries. The Aruba into which she was born was a place of stark contrasts: a devoutly Catholic, Papiamento-speaking society rooted in deep colonial tradition, yet simmering with the first stirrings of political awakening and industrial transformation. Her family were modest Catholic farmers, and Laura was the eldest of three children — a position that would instil in her a lifelong sense of responsibility toward others.

The Aruba of the early twentieth century was on the cusp of dramatic change. The discovery of oil deposits in nearby Venezuela had prompted Shell and Standard Oil (through its Lago subsidiary) to establish massive refineries on the island beginning in the late 1920s, and by the 1930s and 1940s, Aruba had transformed from a sleepy, subsistence-farming island into one of the most economically significant oil refining hubs in the Western world. Yet this industrial prosperity was largely controlled by foreign corporations, and the vast majority of ordinary Arubans — especially women and rural families — remained distant from the levers of power and social advancement. It was into this contradictory world that Laura Paskel grew up, and it was against this backdrop that she would forge a life of extraordinary resilience and ambition.

Crossing the Ocean: Education in the Netherlands

At the remarkable age of fifteen, Laura Paskel made a journey that very few Aruban girls of her generation would dare to contemplate. On the advice of Dominican nuns who recognised her exceptional intellectual potential, she boarded a ship and sailed to the Netherlands to pursue a formal teaching education — a voyage of thousands of miles from the only home she had ever known. She enrolled at the Roman Catholic teacher training college in Reuver, in the Dutch province of Limburg, dedicating years to her studies far from her family, her island, and her language.

In 1931, Laura Paskel graduated with her Akte van Bekwaamheid als Onderwijzeres — a formal teaching certificate — making her and her classmate Magdalena de Cuba the first two Aruban women to qualify as teachers through study in the Netherlands. This was no small feat in an era when higher education for women in the Caribbean was barely conceivable, and when the Dutch educational establishment was still largely a male domain. The achievement announced to Aruba that its daughters were capable of competing, and excelling, at the highest levels of European academic life.

"Miss Laura": A Dedicated Educator

Upon her return to Aruba, Laura Paskel was appointed as a teacher at the Maria School in Santa Cruz — the very community where she had grown up. She quickly became beloved by her pupils and their families, earning the affectionate title "Miss Laura." She brought to the classroom not only rigorous academic training but also a deep commitment to Aruban identity and community uplift. Her teaching was understood not merely as instruction in reading and arithmetic, but as an act of empowerment — equipping children from humble backgrounds with the tools to claim their place in a rapidly changing world.

However, the deeply patriarchal customs of the era intervened. In 1937, following her marriage to Willem Wernet, Laura was compelled to resign from her teaching post. At the time, it was common practice — often enforced by colonial educational regulations — for women to forfeit their public sector positions upon marriage. The underlying assumption was that a married woman's duty lay entirely within the domestic sphere. For Laura Wernet-Paskel, this was a profound injustice, and it would become one of the driving forces behind her later political activism.

Rather than withdrawing into domesticity, she channelled her energies in new directions. She managed her husband's businesses and raised seven children, but she also did something quietly radical: she opened a private library in her own home, lending books to local clergy, neighbours, and community members at a time when Aruba had no public library. This act — making knowledge freely available to all who sought it — encapsulated the philosophy that would define her entire life.

A Pioneer at the Ballot Box

When Laura Wernet-Paskel returned to teaching on a contract basis in 1948, working at the Maria School and later at Filomena College in San Nicolaas, she re-entered public life at a moment of extraordinary political ferment. The year 1949 marked Aruba's first parliamentary elections under a new system of universal adult suffrage — a transformative shift that, for the first time, gave ordinary Arubans, men and women alike, the right to vote and to stand for office.

Laura Wernet-Paskel seized the moment. She became the first woman in Aruba's history to stand as a candidate for political office, running under the banner of the UNA (Unión Nacionalista Arubano, or National Aruban Union), a party that championed Aruban autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Her candidacy was extraordinary not just as a gender milestone but as a courageous public statement: she was demanding that women's voices be heard in the halls of power, at a time when many in Aruban society — men and women alike — considered politics an exclusively male domain. She ran for office three times in total, and while she did not win a seat, her persistent candidacy cracked open a door that subsequent generations would push wide open.

"She was a woman ahead of her time — a teacher, a writer, a fighter for justice — who refused to accept that the world as it was, was the world as it had to be."

Her political activism extended beyond the ballot box. In 1951, she lent her voice and moral authority to Aruban women who were organising protests against the government-sanctioned brothel at Campo Alegre (known locally as Juwana Morto). These protests were among the first organised expressions of women's collective political power in Aruban history, and Wernet-Paskel's involvement helped legitimise the movement in the eyes of the broader community.

A Writer Who Preserved Her Island's Soul

Through all the upheavals of her life — the years away in the Netherlands, the forced resignation from teaching, the demands of motherhood, and the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics — Laura Wernet-Paskel never stopped writing. She composed poetry and short stories, contributing to a nascent Aruban literary tradition at a time when Papiamento-language literature was still finding its feet. But her most significant literary achievement was her book Ons Eilantje Aruba ("Our Little Island of Aruba") — a work of local history that documented the people, traditions, and character of Aruba for future generations.

Published posthumously, Ons Eilantje Aruba is recognised as a landmark work: the first written history of Aruba by a woman. In an era when history was almost exclusively written by men — usually colonial administrators, missionaries, or Dutch scholars — Wernet-Paskel's decision to record Aruba's story from the perspective of an Aruban woman born in a village farm was a profoundly subversive and vital act. The book preserves voices and perspectives that might otherwise have been lost entirely.

Final Years and Passing

Laura Wernet-Paskel died on September 8, 1962, at the age of fifty-one — far too young, and with much yet to give. She left behind seven children, a school full of former pupils who carried her lessons in their hearts, a community she had served in countless ways, and a manuscript that would outlive her. The Aruba she left was still, in many ways, struggling with the colonial structures she had spent her adult life challenging. But the seeds she had planted — in education, in politics, in literature, in the consciousness of Aruban women — would bear fruit in the decades to come.

Legacy and Lasting Honour

The recognition of Laura Wernet-Paskel's contributions has grown steadily in the years since her death. In 1992, the Sint Janschool in Kadushi Largo was renamed Colegio Laura Wernet-Paskel in her honour, ensuring that generations of Aruban children would learn under the name of the island's most pioneering female educator. In 1999, the government of Aruba named her "Woman of the Millennium" — a tribute to the extraordinary breadth and depth of her contributions. She has also been honoured on commemorative postage stamps, and efforts have been made to name a street in Aruba — Caya Laura Wernet-Paskel — in her memory.

Perhaps the most poignant recognition came from the Netherlands itself. In 2021, the municipality of The Hague named a street and courtyard in the Escamp neighbourhood the Laura Wernet-Paskelhof — making her the only person from Aruba among the eight individuals so honoured in that particular Dutch development project. The gesture was deeply symbolic: the same country whose educational system she had crossed an ocean to master, and whose colonial customs had forced her out of a job she loved, was now permanently engraving her name into its urban landscape.

Laura Wernet-Paskel's life is a story about the stubborn refusal to be silenced. She was, in every sense, a woman who acted before the world was ready for her — and changed it anyway.