Cuban Plant Specialist Group chair: Angela Leiva Sánchez   Angela Leiva Sánchez Angela Leiva Sánchez has been working as director of the National Botanic Garden of the University of Havana, Cuba, for 35 years. She has been directly involved in the establishment of a Cuban plant collection, especially Cuban palms, in the Botanic Garden. A graduate of the University of La Habana, she completed her PhD in Biology at the same university in 1980. Angela has spent 20 years working for the conservation of threatened plants and has been a contributor to BGCI in the preparation of a conservation strategy for the botanic gardens of the Caribbean and Latin America. Since its founding in 1990, Angela has presided over the Asociación Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Jardines Botánicos. The same year she organized the Cuban network of botanic gardens and has coordinated it since its creation. Angela participated as a member of the Gran Canaria group that prepared the first ideas for the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). She has helped to organize three CAMP workshops in the National Botanic Garden under the guidance of personnel of CBSG/ SSC/ IUCN for the conservation assessment of Cuban endemic plants. She has also been Chair of the Cuban Plant Specialist Group of SSC since its creation in 2003. Angela is now co-ordinating the efforts and commitments of the Cuban Network of Botanic Gardens to accomplish Target Eight of the GSPC and is conducting a project on the reintroduction to the wild of five threatened Cuban plants. She is a member of the Palm Specialist Group of SSC/ IUCN. Nowadays, the Cuban Plant Specialist Group is very concerned with the accomplishment of Target Two of GSPC, to produce a preliminary assessment of the conservation status of about 5,000 species of vascular plants not yet categorized or data deficient by 2010.

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