Elías Amor Bravo is a professor of economics at Universidad ESIC Business School (Valencia, Spain). He is a well known Cuban economist and is the president of the Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos (OCDH). He is among the most active economists in the analysis of the Cuban economic crisis and its potential resolution. His commentary on the Cuban economic situation is widely followed in English and Spanish. He is a member of Convivencia and of the Félix Varela Center at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid). He is servig as president of the Unión Liberal Cubana. Among the books he has authred are Economía cubana, la oportunidad perdida (Editorial Aduana Vieja, 2010) and Economía cubana: 2009-2019 (Editoral Infante, 2020). He serves as a collaboraor on economic themes with Cibercuba, Diario de Cuba, 14 y medio, Radio televisión Marti.
Larry Catá Backer (Pennsylvania State University; Coalition for Peace & Ethics) is a founding member of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics and serves as the W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar , Professor of Law and International Affairs at Penn State. He teaches and researches in the area of globalization, including public and private law systems and the emerging forms of data driven governance, and has lectured on these topics in Austria, Europe, Latin America, and Europe. He has been a visiting scholar at universities in Australia, China, and Europe. He has written extensively on the emergence of 21st century Marxist Leninist political and economic orders in China and Cuba. In addition to his articles, Professor has published Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era (Little Sir Press, 2018). His latest article is “Popular Participation in the Constitution of the Illiberal State—An Empirical Study of Popular Engagement and Constitutional Reform in Cuba and the Contours of Cuban Socialist Democracy 2.0,” Emory International Law Review 34(1):183-276 (2020) (with Flora Sapio, and James Korman).
Natalia Delgado is the Director, Cuba Capacity Building Project at Columbia University. varied legal and business career includes acting as a senior executive of a public company, a board member of one of the largest transit systems in the world, and partner of a nationally recognized law firm. Delgado has also engaged in the private practice of law for almost 25 years as a corporate and securities lawyer, including as a partner at Jenner & Block in Chicago. Delgado directs the Cuba Capacity Building Project at Columbia Law School, an initiative designed to foster the development of the legal institutions necessary for Cuba to transition to a more market-based economy. She has served on several boards, including the National Women’s Law Center, the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School of Chicago, and the Appleseed Foundation. Ms. Delgado, a Cuban-born American, graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and Oberlin College.
Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History; and Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean who specializes in the study of comparative slavery and race relations, Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics and Professor of African and African American Studies. He is the author of Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and of A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). He is also the curator of two art exhibits dealing with issues of race: Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art (2010-12) and Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba (ongoing). De la Fuente is currently working on a comparative study of slaves and the law in Cuba, Virginia and Louisiana. He is the editor of Transition magazine and of the journal Cuban Studies.
Mario Gonzalez-Corzo is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Business at Lehman College of The City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Economics and Finance. Dr. González-Corzo is a Faculty Fellow at the Cuba Project of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies in The Graduate Center (CUNY) and Contributing Editor for the section on the Cuban economy of the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) published by the Library of Congress. His research and publications include financial sector employment trends and recent developments, entrepreneurship, with a focus on transition or post-socialist economies, and economic reforms in transition economies, with a particular emphasis on Cuban agriculture, banking, and the emerging non-State sector.
Yuri Gonzalez Hernandez. Mr. Gonzalez Hernandez is a Cuban Lawyer (University of Havana 2009) who is currently in residence at Penn State where he is working on his LLM degree. Before his arrival at Penn State, Mr. Gonzalez Hernandez worked as legal advisor for different Cubans companies, and the tax office of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. Since 2016 he has provided legal advice to self-employed workers, and also has participated in non-profit entrepreneur projects, aimed at the development of some communities of the City of Havana. He may be contacted at glezyuri15[AT]gmail.com
Vadim Grishin holds a PhD in Social Science and an MBA from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. After the collapse of the USSR, Dr. Grishin was involved in the reform process in Russia, serving as Advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation from 1992-1993 and 2006-2009. Dr. Grishin has extensive experience working with the Bretton Woods Institutions. He was the Executive Director and Board Member of the World Bank Group from 2010-2014. He serves as Senior Advisor at the International Monetary Fund and has taght courses on the economics of transition at Georgetown University, and at the George Washington University.
Tanya K. Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Research and teaching areas include Discrimination; Latin America/Latin American Law; Employment; Trust and Wills; Critical Race Theory, The Science of Implicit Bias: New Pathways to Social Justice. Recent publications include: Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response; Book On Latino Anti-Black Bias: “Racial Innocence” and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press); Book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (forthcoming from NYU Press) (https://nyupress.org/books/9781479830329/ ); Book Chapter, “Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Census Categorization of Latinos: Race, Ethnicity or Other?” in the book Anti-Blackness, eds. João Costa Vargas & Moon-Kie Jung (under review with Duke University Press) Book Chapter, “Race and The Law in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Afro-Latin American Politics” eds. Kwame Dixon & Ollie Johnson (forthcoming from Routledge) Book Chapter, “Law and Race in Latin America,” in Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America, eds. Tatiana Alfonso, Karina Ansolabehere, and Rachel Sieder (forthcoming from Routledge) Book Chapter, “Constitutional Controversies: Comparing Constitutions in Latin America regarding Race Discrimination,” in Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Latin America, eds. Roberto Gargarella and Conrado Hubner Mendes (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
Luis R. Luis is an international economist in Massachusetts specializing in international finance. He has long been involved in international finance and investments as an officer of international organizations, commercial banks and investment management companies. Luis is a member of ASCE since its foundation. He holds a PhD degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame and has lectured at universities in the US, Europe and South America.
Frank Martínez studied Macro and Micro Economic Theory, Advanced Econometrics, International Trade and Finance, Analysis of Financial Statements, and other subjects at the University of Havana. There, he participated as ambassador student at the Model United Nations and, for three terms, at the International Summer School Conference in Economics and Management (ISSEM and ICEM) organized by the university Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Havana. In 2015, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics (five-year program) after writing the thesis: “Modeling Client Satisfaction: The Tropicana Case”. He was awarded a 2015 Summer graduate fellowship at Georgetown University in Washington DC, when he first came to the United States. Currently, he is a Master’s degree candidate in International Relations at the University of Rhode Island and is serving a first term on ASCE’ Board during the period 2018-2020.
Gary H. Maybarduk is a PhD economist, a retired For- eign Service Officer and a member of the ASCE Board. He has been writing on the Cuban economy since 1999 when he was Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.
Carmelo Mesa-Lago is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics and Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a visiting professor/researcher in eight countries and lecturer in 39, founder/editor for 18 years of the journal Cuban Studies, and author of 95 books/pamphlets and 318 articles/chapters published in nine languages in 35 countries, about half of them on Cuba’s economy and social welfare. He was selected among the 50 most influential Ibero-American intellectuals in 2014, and nominated to the SSRC Albert O. Hirschman Prize in Social Sciences in 2020. He is a member of the Community Advisory Board of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute.
Pedro Monreal is a programme specialist at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization | UNESCO · Sector Social and Human Sciences . Doctor en Ciencias Económicas por la Universidad de La Habana (1999). Estudios de posgrado en la Universidad del Sur de California (USC), La Jolla, Estados Unidos. Autor de artículos y libros sobre economía cubana y desarrollo internacional. Premio Internacional al Pensamiento Caribeño, en la modalidad de Economía 2003, otorgado por la UNESCO y el Estado de Quintana Roo. Profesor invitado en la Universidad de La Sorbona (Francia), Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Harvard (Estados Unidos), Universidad de Utsunomiya (Japón) y Universidad de la Florida (Gainesville, Estados Unidos). Investigador invitado en el Center for Development Research (Copenhage, Dinamarca), la Universidad de Notre Dame (Estados Unidos), y el Institute of Latin American Studies (Hamburgo, Alemania). Durante el periodo 2008-2012 coordinó programas de capacitación juvenil para la lucha contra la pobreza en varios países del Caribe anglófono. Actualmente diseña y gestiona proyectos de colaboración internacional de capacitación para el desarrollo y la inclusión social en países de África, el Medio Oriente, América Latina y el Caribe. Coordina el programa “Pobreza Cero”, de Cuba Posible.
Roberto Orro Fernandez, Independent Consultant, San Juan, Puerto Rico). Orro is an economist graduated from the University of Havana, Cuba. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from el Colegio de México. Mr. Orro has accumulated academic and professional experience in different countries. He started his professional career in the Cuban Armed Forces, in the military construction sector. He worked as a lecturer researcher at the University of Havana, Cuba and the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. He worked for H. Calero Consulting Group, Inc., an economic and financial consulting firm in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Since 2005, Orro works as an independent consultant in San Juan, Puerto Rico, covering a variety of feasibility, market, litigation and forecast assignments. He is a member of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) since 1997 and served as member of the ASCE Board from 2008 to 2012. Mr. Orro has made contributions in the fields of monetary policy, dollarization in Cuba and economic and political transition in former socialist countries. Roberto Orro is a certified real estate appraiser (EPA 1366) and Vice-president of the Puerto Rico Association of Financial Analysts.
Silvia Pedraza is Professor of Sociology and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include the sociology of immigration, race, and ethnicity in America, as well as the sociology of Cuba’s revolution and exodus. Her research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of immigration as a historical process that forms and transforms nations. She is the author of several books, including Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and has just finished a book on Revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela: One Hope, Two Realities, together with Carlos A. Romero, Universidad Central de Venezuela. The book will be published by the University of Florida Press. In the American Sociological Association (ASA), she was Chair of several Sections: the Latina/o Sociology, Race and Ethnic Minorities, and the International Migration Sections. She also served on the Council. In the Social Science History Association (SSHA), she was on the Executive Committee and is now on the Editorial Board of their journal. At present, she is President of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy and society (ASCE).
Lorenzo I. Perez (IMF retired). Lorenzo l. Perez retired from the International after 30 years of working on Latin America, Middle East, Central Asia and African countries. Since his retirement he has consulted for the World Bank Evaluation Group, the IMF Evaluation Office and the Centennial Group from Washington, DC. He has also taught international economics at George Washington University.
Jorge Pérez-López is an international economist who has worked in the Office of International Economic Affairs, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor. He has also worked as director of monitoring at the Fair Labor Association. He is a long-term student of the Cuban economy, particularly of the system of national accounts, international trade and investment, the sugar industry and labor issues. His book-length publications on Cuba include Paths for Cuba: Reforming Communism in Comparative Perspective, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019 (co-edited with Scott Morgenstern and Jerome Branche); Cuba Under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013 (co-authored with Carmelo Mesa-Lago); Corruption in Cuba: Castro and Beyond, University of Texas Press, 2006 (co-authored with Sergio Díaz-Briquets); Reinventing the Cuban Sugar Agroindustry, Lexington Books, 2005 (co-edited with José Alvarez); and The Economics of Cuban Sugar, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. He is a former President of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) and Editor of Cuba in Transition, the papers and proceedings of the annual meetings of ASCE.
Omar Everleny Perez Villanueva (Centro Cristiano de Reflexion y Dialogo). Doctor in Economics from the University of Havana, Cuba. Professor and former Director of the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana. Has been an invited professor at Harvard and Columbia Universities in the US., and at universities in Japan, Canada and France (the Sorbonne), and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Has given over 300 lectures about the Cuban economy, both in Cuba and abroad, and authored over 80 articles, and a number of books on the Cuban economy.
Joaquin P. Pujol (IMF retired). Joaquin Pujol is a macro economist. He graduated from the Wharton School of Finance and the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at the International Monetary Fund for 29 years until his retirement, rising to the position of Assistant Director in both the Western Hemisphere (WHD) Department and the Policy Review Department (PDR). In the WHD he was involved in negotiations of IMF Programs with some 11 Latin American countries. In particular he was the head of mission to Mexico during the Mexican debt crisis (1982-87) and served as Resident Representative of the IMF in Uruguay and as resident adviser to Trinidad and Tobago and to the CARICOM. In PDR he was involved in supervising the work of IMF missions to some 40 countries. He was one of the founders of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE).
Rafael Romeu President and CEO of Devtech Systems, Inc. Rafael Romeu holds a Ph.D. in international Finance from the Department of Economics of the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr Romeo joined DevTech from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he served in the IMF Fiscal Affairs Department as the fiscal economist assigned to Spain. In this capacity, he led discussions on structural fiscal policy issues arising during the European Financial Crisis. Before joining the IMF, Dr. Romeu held positions at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and at the Central Bank of Venezuela. He has been consulted by the US Department of State and the US Department of the Treasury on economic issues relating to Latin America and the Caribbean. He taught financial theory as a visiting lecturer at the Department of Economics of Yale University. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, two books on the emergence of retail trading platforms with direct access to information on the Nasdaq order book, as well as contributed several chapters in other published books. He was the President of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy from 2010-12.
Carlos Seiglie is Professor and former Chair of the economics department at Rutgers-Newark. In addition, he is on the faculty of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers-Newark where he had served as Program Director. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Latin American Studies, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He received his BA degree from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. His research interests include applied microeconomics, defense economics, and international economics. He has taught at Columbia University, the Helsinki School of Economics (now Aalto University School of Economics), the University of Alicante and the Université Pierre Mendes France – Grenoble II. In addition, he has been a consultant to both public and private institutions. Dr. Seiglie is the author of more than 50 refereed journal articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He is a past President of ASCE.
Padel Vidal Alejandro (Professor Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali, Colombia). Pavel Vidal Alejandro received his doctorate in economics from the University of Havana after completing advanced studies in economics at the Universidad de Oviedo, in Oviedo, Spain. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Havana. Since 2012, Professor Padel Vidal has been a professor of economics at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali, Colombia. Previously, he was affiliated with the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy (CEEC) at the University of Havana, and before that he served as an analyst in the monetary policy division of the Central Bank of Cuba. Professor Vidal Alejandro’s specialization has been monetary policy and macroeconomics with a focus on the structural reform process of Cuba. One of his areas of expertise is the use of time series econometric models to develop forecasts and estimate economic indices. He has trained with numerous central banks in Latin America and collaborated with scholars and research institutions in various countries. His academic experiences have involved him, serving as a visiting researcher, at Harvard and Columbia universities in the U.S., the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain, and the Institute for Developing Economies (Japan External Trade Organization) in Japan. Professor Vidal Alejandro also collaborates with the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Banco de la República de Colombia.
Ricardo Torres Pérez (Villa Clara, 1981). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Havana. He is a professor at the Centro de Estudios de la Economía Cubana (CEEC) at the University of Havana. He has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University (2011), Ohio State University (2012), Columbia University (2013), American University (2015), Universidad de La República (Uruguay, 2016, 2018), the Finnish Central Bank and Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (2019). He has participated in conferences and courses in universities and research centers in several countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States, and has published several articles in international journals and books. He is the chief editor of the series Miradas a la Economía Cubana (Views on the Cuban Economy), and a columnist at Progreso Semanal/Progreso Weekly. He is also part of the Editorial Board of the journals Cuban Studies and Temas.
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