14ymedio, Havana, 14 October 2023 — The political alliance between Havana and Moscow involves the teaching of the Russian language. This is demonstrated by the meeting at the Meliá Cohiba hotel this week of a hundred Cuban professors and students with advisors from the Moscow state university Rosbiotech. With the endorsement and funding of the Kremlin, learning the Russian language begins to gain ground on the Island, and the authorities of both countries are determined that Cubans speak Russian “with quality.”
In four days of work, which began at the University of Havana and followed at the hotel, a delegation of Rosbiotech, founded in Moscow in 1930, explained that the course would be funded by Rossotrudnichestvo, a federal collaboration agency supervised by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The goal is to “raise the rating of Russian language teachers in Cuban universities,” said Anastasia Fedosina, director of Rosbiotech’s Center for Engineering and Complementary Education. The project will begin in Havana, but it will soon be repeated in other provincial universities, which sent representatives to the meeting at the Meliá Cohiba.
Although its efforts have redoubled for several months, Moscow has been providing means to Havana for the teaching of Russian for years. The decisive impulse came last May, during the visit of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Chernishenko. Among the many agreements agreed during that visit, the politician had on his agenda a meeting in the classrooms of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in the Cuban capital.
Interviewed by 14ymedio, a cathedral worker said that the Russian classes taught there are free and that they take place every day of the week, except Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at five in the afternoon. The language is taught, he
