Kathryn Burns
Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill specializes in colonial Latin American history, particularly women's history and the history of the Andean region. Her first book, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (1999) won three book prizes and was recently published in a Spanish translation in Lima. Her current research is a foray into legal anthropology; she is examining the history of writing and power in the colonial Andes, tracing the roles of Spanish and indigenous notaries, their clients, and their interests.
Steven Clemons
Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote a new American internationalism that combines a tough minded realism about America's interests in the world with a pragmatic idealism about the kind of world order best suited to America's democratic way of life. He is also a Senior Fellow at New America, and previously served as Executive Vice President. Publisher of the popular political blog “The Washington Note,” Mr. Clemons has served as Executive Vice President of the Economic Strategy Institute, Senior Policy Advisor on Economic and International Affairs to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D NM) and was the first Executive Director of the Nixon Center. Mr. Clemons is a member of the Advisory Board of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. He is also a Board Member of the Global Policy Innovations Program at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and a member of the board of the Citizens for Global Solutions Education Fund. He writes frequently on matters of foreign policy, defense, and international economic policy. His work has appeared in many of the major leading op ed pages, journals, and magazines around the world.
Debra Evenson
An attorney, she has researched and written about Cuba for several decades and is author of Law and Society in Contemporary Cuba (2003). Formerly on the faculty of DePaul University School of Law (1980 1994), for the past 15 years she has been counsel to the law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman, P.C., which represents the Republic of Cuba and its agencies and instrumentalities in the United States. She will be a visiting professor at Rutgers University School of Law in spring 2009.
Albert A. Fox. Jr.
The founder and President of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy, an organization based in Washington, DC. The Alliance was founded in November 1998 to re establish trade and diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.
Mr. Fox has served as a congressional staff assistant in both the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. A successful lobbyist and businessman, he has more than thirty seven years of experience in the federal government and private sector. Beginning in December 1999 and throughout the Elián González saga, Mr. Fox advised the Cuban government, various US Senators and US Congressmen, and appeared on ABC, NBC and Fox News Network promoting six-year old Elián's reunification with his family.
Jonathan Hartlyn
Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research and teaching interests are in the comparative politics of Latin America, especially with relation to questions of democratization, political institutions, and state society relations.
Arthur Heitzer
In private practice in Milwaukee, WI, focusing on employment and civil rights law. He is chair of the National Lawyers Guild Cuba Subcommittee, and is co coordinator of a national network of lawyers established by the Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provides representation for U.S. people being harassed, threatened or fined for travel to Cuba. He has participated in a number of delegations to Cuba, including as part of church missions, and has led attorneys and sister cities delegations to Cuba. In 1999 he hosted the President of Cuba's Supreme Court in his first and only visit to the United States
Evelyne Huber
Morehead Alumni Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is co-author of Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992) and Development and Crisis of the Welfare State (2001), as well as of recent articles on democracy, social policy, poverty, and inequality in Latin America.
Kirby Jones
A Carolina graduate, Mr. Jones made his first visit to Cuba in 1974 as a Special Correspondent for CBS to participate in an interview with Fidel Castro. Since then he has traveled to Cuba regularly for more than 34 years, has taken to Cuba representatives of more than 500 US companies, and currently works as a consultant to U.S. firms interested in conducting business in Cuba (www.alamarcuba.com). He is also founder and president of the US Cuba Trade Association and has been called by the New York Times "the man to see about business in Cuba."
Peter Kornbluh
Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. From 1990 1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. He is the author/editor/co editor of a number of Archive books: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (1992) and The Iran Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (1993), and Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (1998). His articles have been published in Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He has appeared on national television and radio broadcasts, including “60 Minutes,” “The Charlie Rose Show,” “Night Line,” CNN, “All Things Considered,” and "Fresh Air" with Terri Gross.
William M. LeoGrande
Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Professor of Government at American University in Washington, DC. He has written extensively about Cuba, U.S. Cuban relations, and U.S. policy toward Latin America. His most recent book, co edited with several colleagues, is A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution (2007).
Sheryl Lutjens
Director of Women’s Studies at California State University, San Marcos. Her teaching and research interests include comparative politics, Latin American politics, gender and development, public administration, feminist theory, and women and politics. She has written on Cuban women, education in Cuba, and the Cuban state and politics, and more recently, her research has focused on academic relations between the US and Cuba in terms of state security and globalization, children’s issues in North America and the Caribbean, domestic violence in Cuba, and feminist theories of the state. Author of The State, Bureaucracy, and the Cuban Schools: Power and Participation (1996) and co-author of Retreat from Reason: U.S.-Cuban Academic Relations and the Bush Administration (2006).
John McAuliff
Founder and Executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a 23-year old not for profit organization which focused on the normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba, following the success of similar work with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He was active in the civil rights movement including the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, served in the Peace Corps in Peru, headed the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV), participated in the national leadership of the Vietnam anti war movement and directed Indochina peace education programs for a decade with the American Friends Service Committee. He visited Cuba in 1971 and annually since 1997. He is a graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota and an MA level program at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
Félix Masud-Pilot
Professor of history and Director of the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the editor of Diálogo, a multidisciplinary journal of Latin American and Latino affairs, and the author of numerous academic articles on Latin American immigration, Latinos in the United States, and U.S. Cuba relations. He is the author of With Open Arms: Cuban Migration to the United States (1988) and its revised and expanded edition, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: The Cuban Migration to the United States, 1959-1995 (1996), and is presently working on a book-length study, “Contesting Asylum: Cuba, Peru, the U.S., and the Refugee Crisis of 1980,” a history of the Mariel boat-lift and its impact on U.S.-Cuba relations. He frequently travels to Cuba for research and has participated in three major meetings between the Cuban Government and the Cuban exile community to discuss Cuban immigration to the United States. He is the Co-Chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Section on Scholarly Relations with Cuba.
Robert Miles
Associate Dean for Study Abroad and International Exchanges at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2000 and, in that capacity, he has directed the UNC semester study abroad program at the University of Havana since 2003. Prior to taking up his current appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) where he published on the history and theory of racism, and on international migration.
Nancy Mitchell
Associate Professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America (1999) and is finishing a book about Jimmy Carter's policies toward Africa.
Robert Muse
A lawyer in Washington, D.C. with an international trade practice. A native of southern Arizona, he qualified as a barrister in England (Middle Temple) and is a graduate (LL.M.) of Georgetown Law School. Mr. Muse has testified on U.S. trade laws and laws involving Cuba before numerous congressional committees and the European and Canadian parliaments. Among other things, he counsels European companies on U.S. laws relating to Cuba.
José Pertierra
Practices immigration law in the District of Columbia at the law firm of Pertierra & Toro, P.C. He has a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and an M.A. Degree in Philosophy from Georgetown University. Mr. Pertierra is a past recipient of the prestigious Human Rights Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) for his work on behalf of victims of human rights abuse in Guatemala. He also received an AILA Commendation for excellence in advocacy work on behalf of immigrants in the United States. Mr. Pertierra was counsel to the father of Elián González in his efforts to reunite with his son. Mr. Pertierra has written numerous articles on issues involving immigration, extradition and international human rights law.
Philip Peters
Vice-President of the Lexington Institute with responsibility for international economic programs with a focus on Latin America. Prior to joining Lexington, Peters served as a State Department appointee of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush (six years), and as a senior aide in the House of Representatives. A Cuba expert, Peters has traveled throughout the island to monitor the market based changes in Cuba's economy. He has published studies on small business, foreign investment, information technology, historic preservation, state enterprise reform, and other topics. He is also an analyst of U.S. policy toward Cuba. His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Barron's, the Miami Herald, National Geographic Traveler, and specialized publications, and he has provided interviews and commentary on CNN, NBC, Fox News Channel, Univision, and numerous radio programs. Peters serves as advisor to the Cuba Working Group that formed in January 2002 in the House of Representatives. He has testified before Congress and the U.S. International Trade Commission and has given talks on Cuba and U.S. policy to diverse audiences.
Rubén G. Rumbaut
Professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the founding Chair of the Section on International Migration of the American Sociological Association, an elected member of the ASA’s national Council and of the Committee on Population of the National Academy of Sciences, and a founding member of ENCASA/US-CUBA (Emergency Network of Cuban American Scholars and Artists for Change in U.S.-Cuba Policy). A former Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, he is the author of more than one hundred scientific papers on immigrants and refugees in the United States, and coauthor or coeditor of a dozen books, including Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (1994), which received the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award for best book in the immigration field. He recently completed work with a panel of the National Academy of Sciences on two volumes on the Hispanic population of the United States: Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: Hispanics and the American Future (2006), and Hispanics and the Future of America (2006).
Lars Schoultz
The William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of political science at the University of North Carolina. A student of inter American relations, he is the author of That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, which will be published by UNC Press in January, 2009.
Wayne Smith
First went to Cuba in July 1958 as Third Secretary of Embassy and was there until the U.S. broke diplomatic relations in January 1961. He participated in the first talks with the Cubans in New York in 1977 and was then Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1979 until 1982, when he left the Foreign Service because of disagreements over policy. Since then he has directed Cuban programs at the Johns Hopkins University and at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C.
Sarah Stephens
Executive Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA). After previous affiliation with the Washington Office on Latin America and the Center for International Policy, she launched the Center for Democracy in the Americas in 2006. As CDA director, she works with U.S. policymakers, journalists and others, to change the debate on U.S. foreign policy toward the Hemisphere. She has advocated for changes in our policy toward Cuba in forums, editorial columns, and other publications since starting the Freedom to Travel program in 2001. She has also led dozens of delegations of U.S. policymakers, academics, experts, and philanthropists to Chile, Cuba, and Venezuela on fact finding and research missions.
Geoff Thale
Program Director at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). He was the Senior Associate for Central America and Cuba for over a decade, and became Program Director in 2005. He founded and continues to supervise WOLA's Cuba program, which works to improve relations between the U.S. and Cuba, as a more sensible and effective approach to strengthening human rights and democracy on the island. He speaks and writes frequently about U.S. Cuba policy, and about developments in Cuba itself. Most recently, he published "The United States and Post Castro Cuba." He holds a Masters degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Lissa Weinmann
Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York where she has focused on providing a true picture of modern Cuba to U.S. audiences through her writings, conferences, and policy work. She organized the vast National Summit on Cuba conferences in various U.S. cities, including in Miami with Mikhail Gorbachev. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. A frequent traveler to the island, she recently worked on SALUD!, an award winning documentary on Cuba's healthcare system and its international reach.
Deborah M. Weissman
Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Her current teaching interests include immigration, human rights, and gender violence. For the past ten years, she has been engaged in comparative analyses of law related responses to gender violence and its political economic determinants in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. She serves on the Executive Committee for the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American Studies and on the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Robert White
Spent twenty five years in the Foreign Service, where he specialized in Latin American affairs with a particular emphasis on Central America. Among the posts he held were Latin America Director of the Peace Corps, deputy permanent representative to the Organization of American States, ambassador to Paraguay and to El Salvador. After retiring from the Foreign Service in 1981, White served as a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Since joining the Center for International Policy as its president in 1989, he has presided at conferences and led delegations to several Latin American and Caribbean countries, published numerous studies of U.S. policy toward the region, and led an ongoing effort to reform U.S. intelligence agencies.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson
Previously served as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 2005. He is presently the Visiting Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, as well as Professorial Lecturer in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. He served 31 years in the U.S. Army before retiring in 1997.
