Since America’s founding nearly 250 years ago, the country has consistently proven to be a land of opportunity and a beacon of hope for hundreds of millions of people.

Claudia Puig, who was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the U.S. as a young girl, is a testament to this reality. 

“Shortly after the [Cuban] revolution … I think the Cuban people and the country caught on that [Fidel] Castro was not vanilla and he wasn’t what he portrayed to be with his hand on the Bible and the dove on his shoulder and all of this; that he was not going to be anything good for our country,” Puig told IW Features. 

In an effort to counter this threat, Puig’s parents sought to undermine Castro’s power. Her father “trained over here [in the U.S.] and infiltrated into Cuba as part of the infiltration team, and he participated in the Bay of Pigs,” she told IW Features. 

Her parents were captured, however, and following a mock trial, Puig’s father was executed by firing squad. At the same time, her mother was sentenced to 30 years in prison, though she ultimately only served about one year. 

When her mom was freed from prison, the family relocated to the U.S., where they began a new life in Florida. And despite experiencing such tragedy and hardship firsthand as a child, Puig went on to become a highly successful businesswoman.

Puig began her career at AT&T BellSouth and, through much hard work, earned the company’s Elite Club status for advertising sales. Some years later, Puig accepted a job with the Spanish Broadcasting System, where she excelled as National Sales Manager and Vice President of Network Sales. 

Her leadership in the media industry didn’t end there, though. In 1997, she became the General Manager for Univision Radio’s Miami properties.. 

After years in various roles and responsibilities at Univision, and following the company’s restructuring in 2012, Puig continued to succeed and was eventually named President and General Manager of Univision for the South Florida market, where she was responsible for not only two television stations, but also four radio stations. 

On June 26, 2025, Puig was one of four inductees into the Florida Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame. According to the association’s website, the “Hall of Fame inductees were chosen based on their distinguished professional career directly tied to Florida, devoting a minimum of 25 years to the industry.”

Similar to Puig, former U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and her family also had to leave Cuba when she was just a child “because of the communist takeover.”

Despite facing such hardship as a child, Ros-Lehtinen persevered, and in 1989, she made history as the first Latina woman and first Cuban-American elected to the U.S. Congress. 

Ros-Lehtinen said she never had her eyes set on being an elected official. In fact, Ros-Lehtinen shared with IW Features that she “had never been involved in student government or anything like that, so it’s quite a surprise for me to find myself in this situation.” 

The idea for running for office emerged while she was running the bilingual elementary school she founded: Eastern Academy, in Hialeah, Florida. 

Ros-Lehtinen often found herself helping students’ parents with a wide range of issues, such as immigration and housing, because of language barriers. Then one day, someone suggested to her that she “could write the policy that is causing them problems and straighten it out for them” by running for public office. 

Ros-Lehtinen decided to pursue the idea, and she and her parents began taking classes at a Republican Party-led campaign school in Orlando, Florida. Her dad learned about being a campaign manager, and her mom took a class on being a volunteer organizer, Ros-Lehtinen told IW Features. 

“They said, ‘Knock on 20 doors every day, make 10 cold calls and ask for money every day, and then do follow-up letters,’” Ros-Lehtinen said. “We didn’t have emails at the time. This was 1982, and so we worked hard and worked harder than my opponents and won the state House [in 1982].” 

After four years in the Florida state House, during which she met her husband, Florida State Rep. Dexter Lehtinen, Ros-Lehtinen went on to serve in the Florida state Senate in 1986. 

While working in the Florida state legislature “was really an incredible way to help a lot of people,” Ros-Lehtinen told IW Features, what she really loved and felt was lacking at the state level was foreign policy. 

“I came to the U.S. with my parents when I was only eight. I grew up here in the United States, so I loved foreign policy,” Ros-Lehtinen said, adding that “for south Florida, foreign policy is domestic policy, and so I decided, ‘Yeah, let’s run for Congress.’”

On August 29, 1989, Ros-Lehtinen won a special election in Florida’s 18th congressional district.

During her nearly 30 years in office, Ros-Lehtinen served on numerous committees, including as the first female chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and vice-chair of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

In 2003, she co-founded and is currently chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute, or CHLI, “the premier organization founded by Members of Congress to advance the Hispanic Community’s Economic Progress with a focus on Social Responsibility and Global Competitiveness,” according to its website. 

“Powerhouse” and “trailblazer” are how Andeliz Castillo, who previously served as Ros-Lehtinen’s deputy communications director for the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2011 to 2012, described the former congresswoman.

Castillo herself is the daughter and granddaughter of Cuban exiles. So, she told IW Features, she understands “the importance of the free markets, free enterprise,” as well as “democracy and freedom and pro-human rights.” These values were instilled in her from a young age, she said, thanks to her grandfather, an entrepreneur who “had the experience of everything being taken away from him, everything he had worked for” in Cuba.

Castillo majored in political science at Brown University and, in 2005, landed a job working as the scheduler for Florida Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz–Balart in Washington, D.C.

“I started at an entry-level position and got to have that exposure of working in Congress. I loved it. I loved serving the American people,” Castillo said, adding that this role was “a very wonderful and fulfilling experience.”

Castillo, who worked in Diaz–Balart’s office for nearly three years, recalled regularly thinking at the time that she couldn’t believe she was actually living out the type of work she had studied in college. 

In 2010,Castillo accepted a communications role with the House Republican Conference, doing “outreach, communications, and coalition building” for then-Republican Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. 

Fast forward to 2016, when President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence won the presidential election. Castillo was asked to work at the White House as Special Assistant to President Trump, as well as Deputy Director of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs for Vice President Pence. 

Ros-Lehtinen and Castillo aren’t the only women who have made their mark on the conservative political world. 

Leslie Sanchez, a sixth-generation Texan who rose through the ranks to land a director role in President George W. Bush’s White House, and Neri Martinez, who served as a political appointee during President Trump’s first term in office, are two more examples. 

After graduating from high school, Sanchez began selling encyclopedias because she couldn’t afford books and housing in college. That’s when she realized: “I wasn’t selling books. I was selling hope.”

“I really got to know the heartbeat of working-class America, because that’s what I came from,” she added. 

But Sanchez dreamed of a bigger role for herself and set her eyes on the nation’s capital.

“I was wearing cowboy boots. I had a checkbook with $200 and a rosary, and I got on a plane and I said, ‘I’m not coming back,’” Sanchez recalled. “I sold my car, I sold everything. And I was like, ‘That’s it. I’m going to Washington.’”

Sanchez, who transferred to George Washington University upon her arrival in Washington, D.C., eventually found herself working on Capitol Hill for former Texas Rep. Henry Bonilla. She then pivoted to work as Deputy Press Secretary for the Republican National Committee for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1999. There, she played a leading role in the Republican Party’s multi-million dollar polling efforts among Hispanic voters.

“We spent about $5 million in advertising, and it really helped turn into historic wins for George W. Bush,” Sanchez said. “That research ended up defining the next three election cycles for Republicans.”

Sanchez’s experience on Bush’s campaign served as the inspiration for her book, “Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other.” 

Even then, the polling Sanchez helped conduct during Bush’s campaign “predicted where attitudes were shifting politically from a working-class perspective that came to fruition more than 10 years later in 2020,” when President Donald Trump made historic gains among Hispanic voters.

In that sense, Sanchez said her book “was ahead of its time.” 

“But I honestly feel that all those years spent kind of going door to door in this country gave me a very solid grounding on understanding the working class, the kitchen table issues of a lot of America,” Sanchez said. 

Following Bush’s electoral victory, Sanchez was tapped for a position in his administration as Director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education. 

Sanchez’s career accomplishments didn’t end there. In 2008, she made history as the first Hispanic American political commentator in CNN’s history, and in 2015, she joined CBS as a political analyst and producer. 

Three years later, Sanchez made history again as the first Hispanic woman to provide election analysis during CBS News’ prime-time coverage of the 2018 midterm elections. 

Unlike Sanchez, Neri Martinez didn’t come to the nation’s capital in 2011 for politics, telling IW Features she “originally came to D.C. mostly for the lifestyle and the weather.” Eventually, however, she “kind of fell into politics,” and that has shaped her career trajectory ever since. 

In addition to her experience in the first Trump administration, Martinez served as Chief of Staff for Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, which she described as “definitely a highlight of my career.” 

After years of public service, Martinez is now a Senior Government Relations Consultant at Becker & Poliakoff in Washington, D.C. 

For those seeking to effect change at the local, state, or federal level, Martinez advises “to lead from the heart.” 

“I think when it comes to public service, you have to keep the first things first, which is that it is a public service. It’s not about you or your own agenda or your own ego or your self-serving nature, which we all have,” she said. “But it is about what is the mission and what is the goal that you’re trying to accomplish.”

As Martinez put it, staying authentic to yourself is key. 

“Don’t try to be someone else – you’re going to fail at it,” she said. “Just try to be the best version of yourself.”