His guide while in Cuba was an official with Cuba's Foreign Service Institute.

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Mandarin competence takes 2, 200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it's spoken, according to the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute, whereas Spanish can be learned in 600 to 750 class hours.

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Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute and an editor of TAS, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the US Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985.

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