June 13rd, SDUT held an online meeting with Universidad Central de Las Villas at Conference Room, 4st floor of Hongyuan Building, to sign a Memorandum of Cooperation and formally establish a friendly cooperative relationship. President of SDUT LI Yuxia and President of UCLV Luis Olivera attended the meeting and signed the agreement. Vice President of SDUT CONG Hailin presided over the meeting. Vice President of UCLV Nebis Guterres and Director of UCLV China Office CAO Rongduo attended. The heads of the international affairs departments of the two universities also participated in the meeting.
President LIi Yuxia introduced the school orientation, discipline construction, talent cultivation, and international exchange and cooperation and so on. She expressed the expectations for jointly establishing Confucius Institute, conducting teacher-student exchanges, and building an international research platform. She also stated that SDUT is willing to provide support in terms of planning and application for Confucius Institute construction, selection of Chinese teachers, and allocation of educational resources and so on.
President of UCLV Luis introduced the background of UCLV, its disciplinary settings and research advantages, and explicitly expressed willingness to jointly establish the Confucius Institute with SDUT. He also stated that UCLV would actively prepare and follow up step by step according to the planning requirements, striving to build the second Confucius Institute in Cuba as soon as possible. This is aimed at better serving the needs of Chinese language learning for people in central Cuba and promoting the continuous development of friendly relations between China and Cuba.
Both sides expressed their hope to take the co-establishment of the Confucius Institute as an opportunity to explore the construction of an international institute based on their respective advantages and specialties, continue to carry out multi-field and all-round high-level cooperation and exchanges, and make progress in the agreement and the friendly cooperation between the two universities.
Universidad Central de las Villas (UCLV), founded in 1952, is one of the three recognized prestigious schools in Cuba, and it is the most important and comprehensive public higher education center in central Cuba. UCLV hosts 12 colleges. At present, the population of its student totals up to over 11,500, and has built a bachelor, master and doctoral integration of personnel training mechanism. There are 54 bachelor categories of programs, 44 master subjects and 29 PhD. UCLV has signed over 200 cooperation agreements with universities and research institutes in 105 countries and UCLV is ranked 531-540 in the QS World University Rankings 2024.