Benigno Aguirre is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice and Senior Faculty Associate, Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.
José Alvarez is Professor, Food and Research Economics Department, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, where he works as the Area Economist at the Everglades Research and Education Center, Belle Glade, Florida. He has traveled to Cuba in the last few years as one of the principal investigators in two grants from John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to study Cuban agriculture and the potential economic impact on the agricultural economies of Florida and Cuba after lifting the U.S. economic embargo. He earned a B.A. in economics (1971) and M.S. (1974) and Ph.D. (1977) in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida.
Eric N. Baklanoff is Research Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Alabama, where he also served as Dean for International Studies and Programs (1969-74). Before joining Alabama, he directed Louisiana State University’s Latin American Studies Institute (1965-69) and Vanderbilt’s Graduate Center for Latin American Studies (1962-65). He is the author of eight books, among them The Economic Transformation of Spain and Portugal and Expropriation of U.S. Investments in Cuba, Mexico and Chile, as well as of numerous book chapters and articles in professional journals. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Ohio State University.
Juan A. B. Belt is a Senior economist with the Inter- American Development Bank. He works on finance and infrastructure projects, with particular emphasis on telecommunications and information technology. Before joining the IDB, he was the Chief Economist of the Global Bureau of USAID, Deputy Director of USAID Guatemala, and Chief economist of USAID Missions in Panama, Costa Rica and El Salvador. Before working for USAID he was an economist at the World Bank.
Ernesto Betancourt is a consultant on government reforms. He has an MPA from the University of Pittsburgh and studied Advertising and Marketing at American University. He was the first Director of Radio Martí and represented Castro in Washington in 1957-58. He has written extensively on the Cuban Revolution.
Roger R. Betancourt is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland-College Park. He has been a Visiting Professor and Scholar at INSEAD (Fountainbleau, France) and he held the Kermit O. Hanson Visiting Chair at the University of Washington in 1996. He has written extensively on applied microeconomics topics such as shift-work, Capital Utilization: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and the distribution sector, “The Outputs of Retail Activities: Concepts, Measurement and Evidence from U.S. Census Data,” Review of Economics and Statistics (1993), as well as on development issues, “Growth, Capabilities, and Development: Implications for Transition Processes in Cuba,” Economic Development and Cultural Change. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970.
Eric T. Bonnett is a Ph.D. student, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Joshua W. Busby is a doctoral candidate in Government at Georgetown University.
Ed Canler is vice president for Latin America, Textile Rubber and Chemical Company in Dalton, Georgia. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica and subsequently entered graduate studies at the University of Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida.
Rolando H. Castañeda is Principal Project Specialist for the Inter-American Development Bank, based in Santiago, Chile.
Jonathan Coleman is an economist in the Agriculture Division of the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington D.C. The International Trade Commission is an independent, nonpartisan, federal agency, which plays a role in a broad range of international trade matters. Specifically his responsibilities are to monitor trends in international trade in agricultural products and to undertake analysis of U.S. domestic and international trade policies. Prior to joining the Commission he worked for 8 years as an economist at the World Bank in the area of international trade policy. A native of the United Kingdom, he holds an M.S. in economics from the University of Guelph in Canada, and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Michigan State University.
Nicolás Crespo is President, The Phoenix Hospitality and Consulting Corporation, Miami, Florida.
Larry Daley (García-Iñiguez Enamorado) is professor in the Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. His interests are the biophysics and biochemistry of plant germplasm. Professor Daley comes from an old and rural Cuban family, rooted in the forested hills and mountains of Guamá, Sierra Maestra, Oriente province.
Sergio Díaz-Briquets is Vice President of Casals & Associates, Inc. (C&A), a Washington area-based consulting firm. For the seven years, C&A has conducted, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the America’s Accountability and Anti-Corruption (AAA) project. Other C&A projects address similar concerns in specific countries and on a global basis.
Ricardo Donate-Armada has been a consultant at Watson Wyatt & Company in Washington for over 14 years, specializing in the valuation, accounting, and design of pension plans and other post-retirement benefits. He is also an Associate of the Society of Actuaries. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. His previous contributions at ASCE meetings related to Cuban social security, including estimates of the actuarial liabilities of the system and the burden of military and Interior Ministry pensions, and also the actuarial modeling of economic variables.
María Antonia Fernández Mayo is Co-Researcher, International Agricultural Trade and Development Center, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida.
Lev Freinkman is a senior country economist in the World Bank, where he has been working on economies in transition since 1992. He has been covering Armenia since 1998. Before joining the World Bank he held positions with several academic institutions in Moscow, Russia. He has a degree in economics from the Moscow State University.
Robert C. Harding is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Spanish at Lynchburg College in Virginia, where he teaches Latin American politics, international relations, and Spanish language courses. His research focuses on issues of Latin American civil-military relations, democratization, and political economy. He is the author of Military Foundations of Panamanian Politics (Transaction Publishers, 2001) and the co-author (with Juan Carlos Espinosa) of a forthcoming article examining the Cuban military’s business interests. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and was formerly the webmaster for the University of Miami’s School of International Studies.
Ted Henken is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American Studies at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. He received a B.A. degree from Holy Cross College with a double major in Sociology and English Literature and also received an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. He has traveled to Cuba on seven occasions to conduct research and attend economic conferences. His dissertation, in progress, is titled “Condemned to Informality: Cuba’s Experiments with Self-Employment During the Special Period.” He expects to receive his Ph.D. in the spring of 2002.
Antonio Jorge is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations, Florida International University, and Senior Research Scholar, Graduate School for International Studies, University of Miami.
Artimus Keiffer is Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio.
Stephen J. Kimmerling, Esq., is an attorney who researches and writes about legal issues surrounding U.S.-Cuban relations. He has extensive experience organizing conferences on a variety of U.S.-Latin American business issues. He served the New York University School of Law as Cuba Conferences Director, organizing symposia at the Law School on vanguard legal issues in U.S.-Cuban affairs. He holds a J.D. from the New York University School of Law and is a member of the New York and Florida Bars, the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, the American Society of International Law, and the Cuban-American Bar Association.
Aldo M. Leiva is an attorney in Miami, Florida, who researches and writes on Cuban legal and policy issues, ranging from environmental issues to Cuban labor law. Mr. Leiva has addressed Cuban themes on TV Martí, Radio Martí and other media.
Francisco León is currently a consultant on labor market reforms for a UN-CEPAL project on Market and Institutional Reforms in Latin America. He was a Senior Visiting Fellow, Institute for European-Latin American Relations, Madrid, during 2000. From 1971 to 2000, he was Social Research Officer, UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). He earned degrees n Economic Sociology from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
Armando Mastrapa III is the publisher of the CUBAPOLIDATA Internet Web Site and a graduate in Government and Politics from St. John’s University in New York City.
Gary H. Maybarduk, a career Foreign Service Officer, is currently Counselor for Economic Affairs in the American Embassy in Caracas. Her served as Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs in Havana from November 1997 to July 1999. Prior to Havana he served as Deputy Director for Economic Policy and Summit Coordination and Acting Director for Central American Affairs in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Deputy Director for the Economic Bureau’s Policy Analysis Staff, and Deputy Chief of Mission of the American Embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Earlier assignments included Senior Economic Advisor and Legislative Liaison Officer both in the African Bureau, chief of the economic sections in Managua, Nicaragua and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and Assistant Treasury Attaché, Mexico City. Dr. Maybarduk received his B.S. in economics from MIT, a M.A. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a M.S. in international security policy from the National War College, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota.
William A. Messina, Jr., is Executive Coordinator of the International Agricultural Trade and Development Center, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Eusebio Mujal-León is a professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University.
Jorge F. Pérez-López is an international economist with the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor. He is the author of Cuba’s Second Economy: From Behind the Scenes to Center Stage (Transaction Publishers, 1995), co-editor of Perspectives on Cuban Economic Reforms (Arizona State University Press, 1998), and co-author of Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the State University of New York at Albany.
Enrique S. Pumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at William Patterson University, Wayne, New Jersey.
Jorge Luis Romeu is a Senior Engineer with IIT Research Institute in Rome, N.Y. and an Adjunct Professor at Syracuse University. He is also Director of the Juarez-Lincoln-Marti International Education Project. Romeu holds a Licenciado in Mathematics Degree from the University of Havana and a doctorate in Operations Research from Syracuse University. He retired Emeritus from the State University of New York in 1998, where he taught statistics and computers for fourteen years. Romeu is a Chartered Statistician Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and both, a 1994 Senior Fulbright Scholar and a 2000 U.S. Department of State Speaker Specialist, to Mexico.
James E. Ross is Courtesy Professor and Program Advisor, International Agricultural Trade and Development Center, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida.
Paolo Spadoni is a Masters candidate in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Timothy G. Taylor is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Agribusiness, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Matías F. Travieso-Díaz is a partner in Shaw Pittman LLP, a 450-lawyer law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., London, New York City, Los Angeles and Northern Virginia. He is the author of The Laws and Legal System of a Free-Market Cuba (Quorum Books, 1996) and numerous law review articles, papers and newspaper columns on matters related to Cuba’s transition to a free-market, democratic society. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Miami and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University. He earned a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School.
Charles Trumbull is a senior at Dartmouth College. He has traveled to Cuba several times to conduct research on Cuban economic reforms and their impact on society.
William N. Trumbull is Director, Division of Economics and Finance, College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina and his BBA from the University of Miami. His teaching and research interests include comparative economic systems and he teaches a course on the economics of Cuba that includes a field trip to Cuba.
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