14ymedio, Havana, 6 April 2024 — Russia, which already controls investments, companies and all kinds of businesses on the Island, will have its hand in another field: education. As reported this Friday by the Tass agency, the Kremlin plans to open a subsidiary of the Federal University of the South (SFU) at the end of the year, with the approval of the University of Havana and the Ministry of Higher Education. “The project is in the final stage. Changes are being prepared in the university statutes and all the documents to be sent to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation,” Inna Shevchenko, rector of the SFU, told the state agency.
The Cuban SFU, which prides itself on being the first branch of a foreign university on the Island, will aim to prepare “Cubans for admission to Russian universities,” and includes “plans to implement their own master’s programs and additional vocational education,” said the rector without clarifying whether Cuba will also begin to send, as in the years of alliance between Cuba and the Soviet Union, young university students to study en masse in Russia.
The rector also explained that the subsidiary will adopt the programs of the preparatory faculty of the Russian headquarters
The rector also explained that the subsidiary will adopt the programs of the preparatory faculty of the Russian headquarters and plans, for the 2025-2026 academic year, to have its first graduates in the master’s degree program in Pedagogical and Computer Education.
“Students will receive training for undergraduate, master’s, postgraduate and doctoral studies in Russian. Training will also be held in the technological, humanitarian, engineering and natural sciences fields,” says Tass.
The rector also emphasizes that the specializations could increase in the future if the Cuban side so requests. According to her, there has been interest in areas such as Earth Sciences, Electrical and Thermoelectric Engineering, Linguistics and Literary Studies.
The teaching of Russian is another of the purposes of the SFU, which will not only teach classes in that language but also some of its specializations.
The arrival of the SFU has as a precedent in the project “Maximum. Govorim po-russki” (“Maximum. We speak Russian”), funded by the Ministry of Education of Russia with the objective of “teaching Russian to foreign citizens residing abroad.” The teaching is free of charge according to communications to 14ymedio from the company Maximum Education, the promoter of the online program.
The next step was taken last October at the Meliá Cohiba hotel in Havana, where a hundred Cuban professors and students met with advisors from the Moscow state university Rosbiotech determined that Cubans learn to speak Russian “with quality.”
The teaching of Russian is another of the purposes of the SFU, which will not only teach classes in that language but also part of its specializations
In four days of work, which began at the University of Havana and followed at the hotel, the Rosbiotech delegation, 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 qualification of Russian language teachers in Cuban universities,” said Anastasia Fedosina, director of the Rosbiotech Center for Engineering and Complementary Education, who promised that the project would soon be repeated in other provincial universities.
Cuba is also not new ground for the SFU, which in 2018 signed a cooperation agreement with the University of Computer Sciences (UCI) of the Island. At the same time, the Russian-Cuban Center for Research and Development of Computer Technologies and a Laboratory of Advanced Computer Technologies were inaugurated at the headquarters of the Russian university in Taganrog.
Translated by Regina Anavy
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.
