86 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Lino Gutiérrez 1951-2025 An Unsung Hero of the Foreign Service BY CHARLES RAY After 20 years in the Army and then 30 years in the Foreign Service, Ambassador Charles Ray retired in 2012 and now devotes himself full-time to freelance writing, photography, and art. He also lectures, consults, and does public speaking on a variety of subjects. Since 2008, when he published his first book, he’s completed more than 400 fiction and nonfiction works. On May 3, 2025, the Foreign Service lost an icon and one of its strongest supporters with the death of former Ambassador Lino Gutiérrez. Some of us also lost a best friend and mentor. Lino Gutiérrez was born in Cuba on March 26, 1951. Ten years later, just after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, his family fled Cuba for Colombia, where they stayed for 14 months before coming to the United States. When they arrived in the Deep South city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1962, the civil rights movement, which began in the mid1950s, was starting to heat up. In a post-retirement interview with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), Lino remarked that it felt strange to see water fountains marked “colored” and “white.” He recalled the contrast between the friendliness of Southerners and the segregation that marked society. The turbulence of Tuscaloosa, he said, was not completely dissimilar to the upheavals that Castro brought to post-Batista Cuba. Nevertheless, he and his family were happy to be out of Cuba. Lino studied at the University of Miami and the University of Alabama. When the Gutiérrez family arrived in Alabama, the university was lily-white, but by his junior and senior years of high school, the educational institutions had begun to integrate. Lino experienced the civil rights struggle, the marches, the Freedom Riders, and the Birmingham church bombings but noted that by 1969, things had calmed down. Still, except on the newly integrated university football team, Black people pretty much kept to themselves. After graduating in 1972, Lino took the Federal Service Entrance Exam. He scored high enough to be offered two jobs: one with the General Services Administration in Atlanta, Georgia, and another with the Internal Revenue Service in Mobile, Alabama. Neither of these jobs appealed to him, so he stayed in school a few extra months to obtain his teaching certificate. In May 1973, he headed to Miami to explore job opportunities as a teacher. Upon arriving in Miami, he saw an advertisement for a new experimental school called the Street Academy, a federally funded school designed by the Urban League for dropouts and students who had been suspended; he applied and was offered a job as a social studies teacher. Looking back, he described the job as both exhilarating and frustrating. It was, he recalled, a time when the government was putting a lot of money into social programs, but it was also a time of great alienation, especially in minority communities, with violence, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the increasing presence of crime and drugs on the streets. After two years teaching, he was offered an assistantship in Latin American studies at the University of Alabama, where he earned his master’s degree. After two attempts, he passed the Foreign Service examination and joined the U.S. Foreign Service on Jan. 13, 1977. His first Foreign Service assignments were in the Dominican Republic and Portugal. From 1981 to 1983, he served as the Nicaragua desk officer in the State Department, after which he was assigned to Port-au-Prince. From 1985 to 1993, he held various assignments, including Portugal desk officer at State and deputy chief of mission in Nassau, Bahamas. From 1993 to 1994, he attended the Senior Seminar, a prestigious training assignment IN APPRECIATION
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