Great Decisions Program: Cuba after Castro

The Great Decisions Program, coordinated by the Center for International Education and funded by the Ready for the World initiative, will bring five speakers from around the country to address our nation's most pressing foreign policy issues.

The next installment of this series is at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 11, in the Great Room of the International House, featuring Wayne Smith, senior fellow and director, Cuba Program at the Center for International Policy, Washington D.C., speaking on the "Cuba after Castro." Smith's lecture will look at the changes that have occurred since Fidel Castro handed over the presidency of Cuba to his brother, Raul, in early 2008.

Signs of greater economic openness have led to speculation about whether Raul will try to reopen ties with the U.S. Smith also will talk about the role Cuba's American exiles might play in shaping a post-Castro Cuba.

Smith is now a visiting professor of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University, and directs the university's academic exchange program with the University of Havana.

Since 1992, he also has been a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C.

From 1957 to 1982, he worked for the U.S. Department of State. That work took him to the Soviet Union, Argentina and Cuba. He served as the executive secretary of President Kennedy's Latin American Task Force and in 1961 was cited by the Task Force Chairman A.A. Berle as one of the outstanding young Foreign Service officers in the Latin American Bureau. In 1973, he received the Meritorious Honor Award for the sustained excellence of his political reporting from Buenos Aires. When he decided to lave the Foreign Service in 1982 because of fundamental disagreements with the Reagan administration's foreign policy, he was chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Cuba, and was recognized as the State Department's leading expert on Cuba.

A Marine Corps veteran of the Korean Conflict, he has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree form La Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City. He also has a master's degree from Columbia University in New York City and a master's degree and doctorate from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 1990, he received the Henry L. Cain Most Distinguished Alumnus award from La Universidad de las Americas.

For more information about this event or to arrange disability accommodations, contact the International House at (865) 974-4453.