Board Member – Gustavo Arnavat has over 30 years of international investment banking, legal, development and national security experience. He has advised many U.S. and foreign corporations and sovereign governments about commercial, legal and strategic matters and is an expert on economic and social development issues globally, but especially in the Americas.

He is the founder and Executive Chairman of the Cuba Foundation, a NY-based non-profit platform that connects donors, experts and volunteers with legal and ethical projects that provides philanthropic support to Cuba’s emerging private sector: www.cuba-foundation.org. He is also a strategic consultant to private and public sector clients with an interest in Latin America, or Latin American clients with an interest in the U.S.

Gustavo served as the 15th U.S. Executive Director of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group, a position for which he was nominated by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. During his tenure, he negotiated the largest capital increase in the IDB’s history, together with critical improvements to the bank’s operational and risk management policies and approved and supervised over $50 billion is investments in 26 regional countries. He was also a senior member of the Treasury Department’s International Affairs team and served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team.

Before the IDB, Gustavo was an attorney and investment banker in New York, focused on capital markets and M&A transactions for Latin American companies and sovereigns. He began his career as a Presidential Management Fellow at the White House (National Security Council) and the State and Justice Departments.

Gustavo received an A.B., cum laude, from Cornell University, where he was a Cornell Tradition Fellow; a M.P.P. degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he was a Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Harvard Teaching Fellow; and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where he was a Senior Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.