The director of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language (RAE) and president of the Association of the Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), Santiago Muñoz Machado, arrived in Cuba.
This is the first stop on a tour that will put him in touch with seven RAE representations in Central America and the Caribbean.
The essayist and author of historical stories will also visit the headquarters of the Cuban Academy of Language (ACL) this Saturday, in the Santo Domingo building, in Old Havana. There he will meet with City of Havana Historian Eusebio Leal, who is also a full member of the ACL.
Shortly after, Muñoz Machado will attend an ordinary session where he will receive the status of corresponding member of the Cuban institution.
According to the RAE website, this afternoon he should meet with President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez to discuss the continuity of the Cuban Academy and the importance of supporting its work. At that meeting he would be accompanied by Rogelio Rodríguez Coronel, president of the ACL, Eusebio Leal and Abel Prieto, president of the Casa de las Américas.
On Sunday, the visitor will visit places of interest in the Historic Center of Havana and on Monday 17 he will meet with Cuban jurists at the University of Havana, where he will be received by its rector, Dr. Miriam Nicado.
The ACL has been operating since 1926. Its first president was Enrique José Varona, and José María Chacón y Calvo and poet Dulce María Loynaz, Miguel de Cervantes Prize 1992, are remembered among his successors.
The visit and tour of Santiago Muñoz Machado, who is the thirty-first director of the RAE, seeks to strengthen the unity and good use of the Spanish language, a common heritage of 580 million persons, in addition to directly getting to know the situation, projects and activities of each of the academies.
Muñoz Machado has been a professor of Administrative Law at the Complutense University of Madrid since 1994 and an academician of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. His speech when he formed part of the RAE in 2013 is entitled: “The itineraries of freedom of speech.”
