Maurizio Giuliano

Maurizio Giuliano (born 24 February 1975) is a British-Italian traveller, author and journalist. As of 2004 he was, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the youngest person to have visited all sovereign nations of the world (aged 28 years and 361 days). During several periods, he worked for international organizations in the field of media relations.

Giuliano was the son of a lawyer father and a housewife mother. He lived among other countries in Cuba, Chile and Indonesia.

After completing high school in Milan and in Manchester, he earned a degree from the University of Oxford in 1996 and a master's degree from the University of Cambridge in 1997. At University College, Oxford he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, specialising in Latin America and eastern Europe.

As of 1998, he was a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CESOC) in Santiago, Chile.

He authored two books and some academic articles on Cuban politics, focusing among other things on the US embargo, which he claimed (in the book "La Transición Cubana y el "Bloqueo" Norteamericano" and other works) has a strong counter-productive effect, in supporting the continuation of Cuba's regime. In the book and other writings, Giuliano staunchly contested the view that an end to the Castro regime would be near, and expressed the view that any transition would be slow and gradual.

In an article published in the British academic journal Democratization in 1998, he focused in particular on how the US embargo against Cuba helps create "empathy" by third parties towards Cuba, which is then domestically perceived as support towards Cuba's regime. He argued, hence, that the US Government - in addition to the embargo's direct influence on supporting Cuba's regime - indirectly inhibits potentially constructive pressures towards change, insofar as third countries, foreign non-governmental organizations and prominent individuals lend support to Cuba's resistance to the US embargo, and this offsets external pressures to democratize, thereby allowing the Cuban regime to convert such "empathy" into a source of legitimacy at home.

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