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CPF IN THE PRESS

The more who know about the embargo, the more who wanted lifted. An aggressive media strategy has enabled CPF to exercise leadership on the Cuba debate and to play an active role in the shaping of how average Americans and policy makers think about the embargo of Cuba.

And the pay-off is clear: Cuba Policy Foundation is America’s Number One Most Cited Anti-embargo Organization. Cuba Policy Foundation has proven to be a regular, reliable source of information and news for the news media. CPF has appeared in over 350 newspapers, radio programs or television shows since its founding, in markets as diverse as New York City and Tokyo, Miami and Havana -- far-and-away more and broader coverage than any other organization representing our side of the embargo debate.

News media where CPF has appeared include: CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, Fox, MSNBC, ABC Radio, BBC, CBS Radio, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, Fortune Magazine, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Newsday, USA Today, and more.

For press inquiries, contact Brian Alexander, Cell (202) 321-CUBA (2822).

Below is a sample of Cuba Policy Foundation in the News:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Monday, Jan 21, 2002

ELIAN EPISODE GAVE ENVOY NEW OUTLOOK ON CUBA;
SHE FEELS RESUMPTION OF TRADE WOULD BE BETTER APPROACH THAN EMBARGO
by Deirdre Shesgreen

When Elian Gonzalez was rescued off the coast of Miami in fall 1999, Sally Grooms Cowal watched the ensuing drama unfold on television like any other American.

Although she had spent a decade of her life as a diplomat in Spanish-speaking countries, she had never paid much attention to Cuba.

But as the tug-of-war over Elian escalated, Cowal soon found herself at the center of the dispute. And by the time the 6-year-old shipwrecked boy returned to Cuba with his father, the communist island had taken center stage in her life.

Cowal is now president of the Cuba Policy Foundation, a Washington advocacy group that favors lifting the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. It is not a job the 57-year-old widow ever imagined for herself, until the Elian saga.

Cowal grew up in Chicago, the daughter of an air-conditioning salesman and a housewife. As she began to consider a career for herself, her father gave her some blunt advice.

"You're going to be a nurse or a teacher," he told her.

"When I said I didn't want to be either," Cowal recalls, "he said,'Well, you'd better learn to type.' "

Cowal took another route. Although no one in her family had had a passport, she was drawn to the foreign service.

The reason was simple: She realized it was a profession where her gender would not work against her. "It was an equal employment opportunity when a lot of things were not," she says.

In the diplomatic corps, she rose up the ranks. She was a minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico under President Ronald Reagan and then served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter- American affairs under the first President George Bush.

In 1991, Bush chose Cowal to be ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago; President Bill Clinton kept her on in that job.

After leaving the diplomatic corps, Cowal, a self-described independent who has voted for Republicans and Democrats, moved to what she thought would be a lower-profile job as president of Youth for Understanding, an international student exchange program in Washington.

But soon after the Elian imbroglio began, Cowal got a call from her neighbor, Gregory Craig. He was the lawyer for Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian's father, and Craig asked if the exchange program could house Gonzalez while the custody dispute was sorted out.

She hesitated at first, fearful of putting the program in the middle of such a politically dicey situation. But then, she said, "I thought, 'We ask 3,000 American families to host international students every year. How can we say no?' "

The exchange program put the family up at a guest house in Washington, just two blocks from Cowal's own house. The Gonzalez family's stay lasted for about six weeks, and Cowal visited almost every day, spending hours watching Elian and his classmates play and talking to his father.

"It turned out to be a wonderful experience," she says.

And a transforming one. In her time at the State Department, she had not really focused on Cuba but had "towed the party line," arguing that the embargo was the best way to undermine the Castro regime, she says.

But as she grew closer to the Gonzalez family, she started to see the effects of U.S. policy through a personal prism rather than a political one. And she began to question the embargo.

"I realized it was one of the longest-standing foreign policy failures in American history, and I was witnessing this one slice of it," she says. "It changed my life." After the Gonzalez family returned to Cuba and the media frenzy abated, Cowal remained interested in Cuba.

Last year, she agreed to take the helm of the newly formed Cuba Policy Foundation, which she says is trying to approach the issue from a new vantage point.

In the past, Cowal says, advocates of lifting the embargo have appealed to lawmakers with a humanitarian pitch - arguing that the embargo hurts the Cuban people and not Castro.

But she and others make the argument that it is in the U.S. national interest to lift the embargo because American businesses are missing out on economic opportunities on the island.