Cuba on the Brink?
About this Event
About the Panel:
Please join us at IWP for a fireside chat with Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Christine Balling, Senior Vice President at The Institute of World Politics and Senior Fellow for Latin American Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council. This event will be moderated by Dr. Jim Robbins, Senior Vice President, Institute of World Politics.
For decades, the Cuban regime has trained and supported Marxist insurgencies whose acts of terrorism destabilized nations across Latin America. Within the United States, Cuban intelligence has penetrated senior levels of government agencies and continues to conduct information operations, influencing American academia, politics, and culture.
Mr. Gonzalez and Ms. Balling will discuss the ongoing threat Cuba poses to the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere, as well as what might lie ahead for the regime and the Cuban people.
About the Speakers:
Mike Gonzalez
Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, writes on critical race theory, identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia and Latin America. He left journalism to join the administration of President George W. Bush, where he was speechwriter for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau.
Gonzalez, who joined Heritage in March 2009, became a Senior Fellow in June 2014 and a chaired fellow in 2019. He is a widely experienced writer and public speaker. He has written for National Affairs, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, The Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, Quillette, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time.com, The Hill, Forbes.com, USA Today, The Guardian, The National Interest, The Daily Signal, National Review and others. Gonzalez has appeared on Fox, MSNBC, PBS, the BBC, CNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, The Voice of America, Television Española, Canal Plus, and many other networks and stations in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Gonzalez got his first regular reporting beat in 1981, covering high school sports for one summer for The Boston Herald. He went to work for Agence France-Presse in 1987, reporting from around the globe for the news agency for six years, including covering the war in Afghanistan, where he traveled with the Mujahedeen in the late 1980s. In his first foreign assignment in Panama in 1987, he was arrested, jailed overnight and expelled by the dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. After taking off two years to earn a master's degree from Columbia Business School, he next logged 11 years with The Wall Street Journal, writing a column on the stock market in New York before being posted to Hong Kong in 1995 as Deputy Editor of the editorial pages of the newspaper’s Asia edition. Between 1998 and 2003, he served in the same capacity for the European edition in Brussels, before returning to Hong Kong as chief editorial page editor. Gonzalez holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Boston’s Emerson College, and a master's in Business Administration from Columbia Business School.
Books:
, with Katharine Gorka, was published by Encounter Books in April, 2024.
was published by Encounter Books, Sept. 7, 2021.
was published by Encounter Books in 2020.
was published by Crown in 2014.
Christine Balling
Christine Balling is the Senior Vice President for Professional Affiliations and a member of the adjunct faculty at the Institute of World Politics. She serves as the Senior Fellow for Latin American Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council.
In 2009, Ms. Balling founded the Colombian nonprofit organization Fundación ECCO to promote democracy and youth leadership in areas of conflict. She has also served as a subject matter expert to the U.S. Special Operations South commander on demobilization and counter-recruitment issues, partnered with U.S. Army Civil Affairs teams, worked with the Colombian military’s demobilization group, and in collaboration with the Colombian Army, Air Force, and National Police, she led counter-recruitment projects in areas where the FARC insurgency operated.
Ms. Balling has performed extensive fieldwork in conflict areas and interviewed female demobilized members of the FARC, ELN fighters, and female Yazidi peshmerga fighters in Iraq.
She has appeared as a commentator on Newsmax, NewsNation, Real America's Voice (RAV) and NTD; her articles on Latin America have been published in Foreign Affairs, the National Review, The Federalist, The New York Post, U.S. News and World Report, The National Interest, and TheHill.com, among others.
She has lectured at the Escuela Superior de Guerra (ESDEGUE) in Bogotá, the National Defense University’s William J. Perry Center, Harvard University Summer School, The #NatSecGirlsSquad conference, el Foro Internacional de la Mujer, and The Institute of World Politics. In 2019, she testified as an expert witness at a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing on U.S./Colombia relations.
Ms. Balling received the Colombian Armed Forces’ Medal of Distinguished Service from the Colombian Minister of Defense in recognition of her work in Colombia and received the 2020 Phillips Academy Andover Alumni Award of Distinction. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University’s Barnard College and an M.A. in National Security Affairs from The Institute of World Politics.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00 to USD 1068.91
