Speaker Biographies

John Andersen, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Department of Commerce, is the director of the Office of Latin America and the Caribbean. The office is responsible for all market access and commercial issues dealing with Latin America and the Caribbean.  Mr. Andersen has been involved in several major international and bilateral negotiations, including the Uruguay Round, the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement and the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Andersen is a key member for the department on the President's Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. He is presently serving as the department’s coordinator for Cuban affairs, and has received three Department of Commerce Silver Medals, the department's second highest honor.

Juan Belt, an economist, is the director of the Infrastructure and Engineering Office of USAID. The office comprises three teams: Energy, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and Engineering Services, and has a staff of around forty professionals. In addition to managing the largest office in the Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade Bureau, Belt has been personally involved in the evaluation of the government of Egypt’s strategy for ICT, the design of a program in Colombia to provide rural connectivity using wireless technologies, and the provision of support for energy reforms in Colombia and Nicaragua. From 1998 to 2004 he was the senior economist of the Finance and Infrastructure Office at the Inter-American Development Bank, where he worked on infrastructure and financial sector programs in the Andean countries and the Caribbean. From 1983 to 1998 he was a senior foreign service officer at USAID. During that period he was chief economist of the Global Bureau and deputy director in Guatemala (1995–97). He also served as head of the economics offices in USAID missions in El Salvador (1992–95), Costa Rica (1989–92), and Panama (1983–86). While head of these offices he worked mainly on trade issues, privatization, macroeconomics, public finance, and modernization of the state. Prior to his work at USAID, he worked for the World Bank and for the World Bank/Food and Agriculture Organization Program in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. He focused mainly on the design of agricultural and natural resource projects, and in the development of national strategies for those sectors.

Frank Calzon is the executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan, human rights and pro-democracy organization founded in November 1997. The center promotes democratic values and a transition to democracy in Cuba, gathers and disseminates information about Cuba and Cubans, and administers grants from USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the William H. Donner Foundation. Additionally, the center participates in policy debates on Cuba. Calzon has been quoted and his opinion columns have appeared in USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal , and other newspapers in the United States and Latin America. Mr. Calzon has appeared on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Think Tank, Canada’s Face Off, Voice of America’s Foro Interamericano, and on BBC, Radio Martí, and other television and radio outlets. Mr. Calzon 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.

Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986.  He previously practiced law and was an economic consultant, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was editor and publisher of Regulation magazine, and served on the White House staffs of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.  A graduate of Harvard College and the University of Chicago Law School, Mr. DeMuth has published essays on domestic policy and politics in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, Commentary, The American Enterprise, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI. He has taught at the Universities of Illinois, Oregon, and California at Los Angeles, and has also been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Ninety-Ninth Congress he served on the staff of the Senate committee on foreign relations. His recent books include Panama's Canal: What Happens When the United States Gives a Small Country What It Wants, A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously, and Cuba the Morning After. He is a contributor to AEI’s monthly Latin American Outlook.

Georges Fauriol has been senior vice president of the International Republican Institute (IRI) since October 2001. His responsibilities include strategic planning, program development, and long-term evaluation. He also served as vice president of strategic planning and as acting president of IRI in the summer of 2004. Before joining the staff of IRI, Fauriol participated in many IRI assessment missions, training workshops, and election observations beginning in the late 1980s. Fauriol was previously director and a senior fellow of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he was the senior scholar specializing in Western Hemisphere issues, including topics pertaining to the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, and Canada. Additionally, he was the Mexico seminar course chair at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute from 1992 to 2000. He co-chairs the Americas Forum, a Washington, DC, network of hemispheric policy professionals. Previously, Fauriol worked with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Inter-American Development Bank. He is a board member of the Florida Association of Voluntary Agencies for Caribbean Action and a research council member of the Center for a Free Cuba. He has been an adjunct senior research associate at the University of Miami’s North-South Center and has testified before Senate and House subcommittees eighteen times. Fauriol lectures before university audiences, U.S. service academies, and local civic groups, and participates actively in Washington, DC’s think-tank community discussions. He is the author or coauthor of several books and more than fifty publications, including The Cuban Revolution, Guatemala's Political Puzzle, The Third Century: U.S.–Latin American Policy Choices in the 1990s, Cuba, The International Dimension, Haitian Frustrations, Thinking Strategically about 2005: The United States and South America, and Fast Forward: Latin America on the Edge of the Twenty-First Century.

Jose Antonio Font is manager and president of American Capital Partners LLC and founder of the Alliance for Democracy, a Washington, DC– and Miami-based organization that early on advocated policies to achieve the buildup and empowerment of the dissident movement and the development of civic and political democratic leadership at grassroots-levels in Cuba. Throughout his life, Mr. Font has served in many other pro bono capacities in the promotion of political democracy for Cuba, such as taking part in the organizational phase of the “Plan para la Liberación de Cuba” and becoming personal assistant to its founder, Jose Elias de la Torriente, from 1969 to 1971. He served as national secretary for foreign relations and as Washington delegate of the Abdala Cuban Student Movement from 1971 to 1975, establishing a Cuban-American exile lobby initiative in the nation’s capital. In addition, he served as executive director and trustee of the Cuban American National Foundation from 1987 to 1988, and from 1997 to 2000 served as founding director and chairman of the Civil Society Training Bureau of the Institute for Democracy in Cuba. Mr. Font founded and served from 1976 to 1986 as president of the Greater Washington Ibero-American Chamber of Commerce, an organization involved in the promotion of business and economic development for Hispanic Americans in the nation’s capital, and in the promotion of political democracy and the free-enterprise system in the Americas. He was founding vice president and organizer of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce from 1980 to 1985, and from 1980 to 2000 was a founding member of the board of directors of the Hemispheric Congress of Latin Chambers of Commerce and Industry. He is treasurer and chairman of the Finance Committee of the Latin Chamber of Commerce of the United States (CAMACOL), vice chairman of CAMACOL Loan Fund, Inc., and chairman of its newly established Comisión para el Desarrollo Empresarial de Cuba.

Ralph Galliano is editor of the monthly newsletter U.S. Cuba Policy Report and founder of the Institute for U.S. Cuba Relations, a research and education foundation. In the early-to-mid-1990s, he consulted for the American Chamber of Commerce of Cuba in the United States and the U.S.-Cuba Business Council.

The Honorable Carlos Gutierrez is the thirty-fifth secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the voice of business in government. The former chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Kellogg Company, Secretary Gutierrez is a core member of President George W. Bush’s economic team. Secretary Gutierrez oversees a diverse cabinet with some 38,000 workers and a $6.5 billion budget focused on promoting American business at home and abroad. His department gathers vast quantities of economic and demographic data to measure the health and vitality of the economy, promotes U.S. exports, enforces international trade agreements, regulates the export of sensitive goods and technologies, issues patents and trademarks, protects intellectual property, forecasts the weather, conducts oceanic and atmospheric research, provides stewardship over living marine resources, develops and applies technology measurements and standards, formulates telecommunications and technology policy, fosters minority business development, and promotes economic growth in distressed communities. Secretary Gutierrez was sworn into office on February 7, 2005. In 1975 he joined Kellogg as a sales representative. Rising to president and chief executive officer in 1999, he was the youngest CEO in the company’s nearly hundred-year history. In April 2000 he was named chairman of the board of Kellogg Company.
 
Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat is co-founder and national secretary of the Cuban Democratic Directorate (Directorio Democrático Cubano), one of the leading organizations in procuring international support and solidarity for Cuba’s internal pro-democracy movement. He teaches courses in political science and international studies at Florida International University. He has coauthored many of the directorate’s yearly Steps to Freedom reports, which chronicle the growth of the civic movement on the island. He is also the author of La República Invisible [The Invisible Republic], a collection of essays on Cuban national identity, exile politics, and the civic movement on the island.

Caleb McCarry has been the transition coordinator for the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba for the U.S. Department of State since July 2005. He is the senior U.S. official responsible for U.S. government planning to support a transition to democracy in Cuba through the President’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. As transition coordinator, he reports to the assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs on a day-to-day basis and to the secretary of state on important policy matters. Mr. McCarry previously served on the majority professional staff of the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to that, he worked for the bipartisan Center for Democracy.

Roger F. Noriega is a visiting fellow at AEI, coordinating the Institute’s program on Western Hemisphere issues. Twice appointed by President George W. Bush (and confirmed by the U.S. Senate) and with a ten-year career on Capitol Hill, Mr. Noriega’s breadth of experience offers strategic vision and practical insight on the Americas. As assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Mr. Noriega managed a 3,000-person team of professionals in Washington, D.C., and fifty diplomatic posts to design and implement political and economic strategies in Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Mr. Noriega coordinated complex and sensitive multilateral diplomacy in a thirty-four-member international organization to bolster OAS efforts to promote trade, fight illicit drugs, and defend democracy. Mr. Noriega has held various other positions, including senior policy advisor with the U.S. mission to the OAS; many program management and public affairs positions with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State; press secretary and foreign policy advisor for U.S. representative Robert Whittaker (R-Kan.); and research assistant for the secretary of state of Kansas.

John Sanbrailo has been executive director of the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), an affiliate of the Organization of American States (OAS), since 1999. PDAF implements projects that provide employment and other development services to low-income communities and victims of natural disasters and humanitarian crises in the Americas. PADF was established in 1962 as a specialized unit of the OAS for supporting civil society and private-sector development, and promoting microenterprises and entrepreneurship in the region. It assists civil society in accordance with the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Mr. Sanbrailo served for more than thirty years with USAID in Latin America, where he was mission director in El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, and Ecuador. In that capacity, he managed some of the largest international development programs for economic and democratic reforms. He has been a senior consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and various Latin American governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations.

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