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Angel Castillo Jr, a bio
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Angel Castillo, Jr., a Miami attorney, has lived in Miami on and off since 1958. He was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, the oldest of seven children of a labor lawyer and a Catholic high school teacher who turned quickly against the Castro Communist dictatorship and fled to Miami and later relocated to Los Angeles. He attended the La Salle Brothers Catholic school in the Vedado section of Havana, Miami Military Academy, and Miami Edison Senior High School. His interest in journalism began while in high school pedaling a bicycle as a newspaper carrier for the Miami Herald in the pre-dawn hours and for the Miami News in the afternoons. Castillo’s undergraduate education took place at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where he served as student government president and wrote a regular column for the student weekly newspaper, The Stetson Reporter, called “From My Corner”. After college he worked in journalism as a reporter, columnist, and editor in various locations, including the Miami Herald, the Associated Press Bureau in Atlanta, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in Ontario, Canada, the Montreal Star in Quebec, Canada, and the St. Petersburg Times. His most recent full-time assignments in journalism were as legal affairs reporter for the New York Times and as Assistant Managing Editor for News at the Miami Herald, where he also served as editor in chief of the Spanish language daily El Nuevo Herald. Interspersed with his journalism experiences, Castillo earned a law degree (J.D.) at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was executive editor of the Law Review, and an LL.M. degree at the Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked as a law clerk in the United States Attorney’s office in Tampa, as press secretary for the late Robert L. Shevin in his unsuccessful campaign for the Florida Democratic Party nomination for governor, as executive assistant in Tallahassee for the late Florida State Senator Jack D. Gordon when he was in charge of budget matters as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and as a member and volunteer union organizer for the Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO. Castillo was active in the Florida Democratic Party in the 1980s and early 1990s and was a member of the Dade County Democratic Executive Committee when it was chaired by former Florida House Speaker Richard A. Pettigrew. He was named by the late Florida Governor Lawton M. Chiles, Jr. to a commission that recommended nominees for judgeships in the Florida Third District Court of Appeal. When in 1994 President Bill Clinton -- in alliance with Governor Chiles -- announced a new policy of intercepting at sea and returning Cuban refugees to the island, Castillo wrote Chiles to resign from his commission membership and changed his voter registration from Democrat to Independent, a status that he has maintained to the present. He has two twenty-something children and practices law in the employment field in a four-lawyer firm in Miami. He has traveled extensively throughout the state of Florida and the United States, as well as throughout Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Besides Miami, in Florida he has lived in Tampa, Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Jacksonville.



by Dr. Radut.