Alfredo Duran

Alfredo Joaquin González Durán (born 16 August 1936) is a Cuban-born lawyer and an advocate for dialogue as a way to bring regime change in Cuba. His views are considered controversial in some parts of the Cuban exile community in Miami. It was Alliegro, then president of the Senate, who accepted Fulgencio Batista's resignation on Dec. 31, 1958, and then took refuge, with his family, in the Chilean Embassy in Havana for three months. Duran was a member of Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506), a group of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in preparation for the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba and the planned overthrow of its prime minister, Fidel Castro. before being ransomed by U.S. organizations and businesses.

After his release in December 1962, Duran remained active in anti-Castro circles and joined the Veteran's Association of Brigade 2506, serving as president two years in a row. An item in a Miami News news social column characterized the wedding as "the union of two of Cuba's most powerful political families."

Political turnaround During the late 1980s, Duran began to have private misgivings about the advisability of a military solution to obtaining regime change in Cuba. Duran did not go public with his doubts until the early 1990s, after the fall of Soviet Union. During that 2001 visit to Cuba, Duran met with José Ramón Fernández, who is now a vice president of the Cuban Council of Ministers but who, in April 1961, was the executive commander (directly reporting to Fidel Castro) in charge of Cuba's defending forces during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Duran called that encounter "very emotional."

Duran has publicly called for an end to all travel restrictions to Cuba. As he said on PBS NewsHour:

We must absolutely lift all restrictions for Americans to travel to Cuba. It's a constitutional right of all Americans to be—it must be protected under the laws of this country. And I think that if Cuban-Americans are allowed to go, Americans should be allowed to go. And I think that's going to have a tremendous impact, because the travel of Americans is not like the travel of Europeans or Canadians. Cubans play baseball; they don't play hockey. And our cultural nearness is very similar. You go to Cuba right now, and it's like the Russians had never gone by there. You go to Cuba right now, and you still can feel the influence of our American tradition in the past and our cultural nearness.