Jorge Mas Canosa

Jorge Lincoln Mas Canosa (21 September 1939 – 24 November 1997) was a Cuban-American businessman who founded the Cuban American National Foundation and MasTec, a publicly traded company. Regarded within the United States as a powerful lobbyist on Cuban and anti-Castro political positions, he was labeled a "counterrevolutionary" by the Cuban Communist Party. Mas Canosa was the driving force behind the creation of both Radio Marti and TV Marti and was appointed chairman of the advisory panel by President Ronald Reagan. In the early 1960s, he was trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. Under his leadership, the Cuban-American national Foundation received criticism for its role in covert operations in Cuba. In 1998, The New York Times published several articles on Mas Canosa's relationship with Luis Posada Carriles, a militant anti-communist Cuban exile. Biography Jorge Mas Canosa was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba on September 21, 1939. His father (Jorge Mas Santos) was the son of Antoni Mas Oliver (from Can Tranquil) and Catalina Carbonell Monjo (from Roqueta), Spanish immigrants from Maria de la Salut, in Majorca. At age fourteen, Mas was arrested for his role in an anti-Batista radio broadcast. Mas Canosa was sent by his father to the United States where he studied at a Presbyterian Junior College in Maxton, North Carolina. He returned to Cuba in 1959 a week after Castro seized power, and briefly attended law school at Oriente University. Not long after his return to Cuba, he was implicated in antigovernment activities by the Castro regime and arrested for plastering anti-Castro stickers on buildings.