March 17, 2005

Speakers Biographies

Juan José Buitrago de Benito is the political counselor at the Embassy of Spain in charge of Latin American and Hispanic Affairs. In 2002 he was an advisor on Latin American affairs to Jose Maria Aznar, the president of the government of Spain. Before that, he was the director of the Office for Mexico, Central American and the Caribbean Affairs at the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also served as the cabinet advisor to Abel Matutes, the minister of foreign affairs. Mr. Buitrago de Benito entered the Spanish Diplomatic Service in 1988, and soon became the deputy chief of mission at the Embassy of Spain in Kuwait, Guatemala and Mozambique.

Frank Calzón is the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, an independent, not-for-profit human rights and pro-democracy organization founded in November 1997. Mr. Calzón formerly served as the Washington representative of Freedom House for eleven years and led the Freedom House delegation to the annual meetings of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. He has testified before Congressional committees on Cuba and U.S.-Cuba policy. Mr. Calzón was born in Cuba.

Arlette Conzemius became ambassador of Luxembourg to the United States in 1998 after spending five years as ambassador and permanent representative of Luxembourg to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. From 1989 to 1993, she served as deputy chief of mission at the Luxembourg Embassy in Washington. Ambassador Conzemius was the permanent representative of Luxembourg to the European Communities in Brussels from 1983 to 1988. She began her diplomatic career in 1981 as directorate for international economic relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar emeritus at AEI. He has taught at the universities of Illinois, Oregon, and California-Los Angeles and has also been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. During the 99th Congress, he served on the staff of the Senate committee on Foreign Relations. His books include Panama's Canal: What Happens When the United States Gives a Small Country What it Wants (1998); A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously (1998); and Cuba the Morning After, which was published by AEI in 2003.

Tomas Pojar is the director of People in Need (PIN), a Czech human rights and humanitarian aid organization, whose assistance programs focus on Cuba, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Burma and North Korea. Since its founding by Czech journalists in 1992, PIN has distributed over 74 million dollars. Mr. Pojar is also the co-chairman of the Czech government's committee for cooperation with nongovernmental organizations. In 2004, he was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Before that, Mr. Pojar served with PIN to provide relief in the Balkans, Chechnya and Ingushetia.

Radek Sikorski is the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative and a resident fellow at AEI. He was Poland's deputy minister for foreign affairs from 1998 to 2001. As the country's deputy minister for defense in the first democratically elected government after the fall of Communism, he spearheaded Poland’s drive to join NATO. From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a war correspondent to Afghanistan and Angola, contributing to the Spectator (London) and National Review. He is the author of Dust of the Saints: A Journey to Herat in Time of War (1989) and The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland (1997). His photograph from Afghanistan received the World Press Photo Award in 1988. From 1981 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a political refugee in the United Kingdom.

Maria Werlau is the principal of Orbis International and the president of the Free Society Project, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights through research and scholarship. She is a news analyst for La Noticia por Dentro ("Inside the News"), a weekly radio program transmitted in Spanish to Cuba by Radio Martí/Voice of America. Ms. Werlau is actively involved in the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy and she served in the most recent Independent Task Force on U.S.-Cuba Relations of the Council on Foreign Relations. As former second vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Ms. Werlau has lived in Chile, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Throughout her career she has written extensively on a wide range of Cuban issues, particularly economic matters, foreign investment, and policy. Born in Cuba, Ms. Werlau left the country when she was eight months old. Since then she has been to Cuba once, in 1998 during the Pope's visit, but she has not been allowed back by the Cuban government.

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