by Raul Menchaca
HAVANA, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese cuisine, traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts have all found a new home in Cuba, and for the past fortnight, the Mandarin language has come into the life of students in the University of Havana.
Both the University's Faculties of Foreign Languages and Tourism began to offer year-and-a-half programs on Mandarin study starting Feb. 4. Every Tuesday and Thursday, 16 young Cubans gather in a classroom to learn standard Mandarin for three hours.
"Cuban students are very excited about learning," said Xu Yi, a graduate of Beijing Language and Culture University who taught the class and has lived in Cuba for the last three years.
The 16 students enrolled for the Chinese language program are lucky since there were many more applicants for the program, according to Xu.
"From a linguistic point of view, Mandarin has a more basic structure, which eases its learning," a student named Chabelys Lora said, adding that she and her classmates found Mandarin's tones quite difficult.
"Language is a bridge, because when a person begins to learn a foreign language, the person falls in love with that country, its culture, and its people," she said, expressing the belief that Chinese learners will become goodwill ambassadors between the two peoples.
Last November, Cuban Education Minister Ena Elsa Velazquez and Chinese Vice Education Minister Zheng Fuzhi signed a Framework Exchange Agreement for joint work in the field.
The two-year agreement includes Mandarin teaching in some Cuban schools, scholarships for Cuban students, and exchange of information between institutions.
Apart from Cuban universities, the Confucius Institute of Havana has also been making the Chinese language and culture more popular.
Founded in 2009, the Confucius institute began its academic activities in January 2010, following the cooperation between China's Confucius Institute Headquarters and the University of Havana. The institute has seen an explosion of enrollment these years, for both adults and children.
Many Cubans learning Chinese are looking forward to communicating with the Chinese people, and hope to use their language proficiency in work.
Some students in the Mandarin class of the University of Havana are interested in becoming interpreters, said Lora.
"Cuba has signed many agreements with China, therefore as translators and interpreters, we will have much more work in Mandarin than what we might have in other languages," she said.
