Jeanette Nuñez’s father never fell for it. While others in Cuba in the late 1950s may have waited to see what Castro’s revolution would bring, her father knew from the beginning — and said so. He distributed anti-Castro flyers. He threw them from car windows. Eventually, he was placed under what amounted to house arrest, monitored by the government, on someone’s list. He made the decision to leave first, ahead of his wife and their newborn daughter, not knowing when they would reunite.

Her mother’s journey was its own act of courage. She had to pretend she had been abandoned by her husband. She could trust no one — not neighbors, not acquaintances. Six months after her father left, her mother made the trek, with her sister in tow. The family was whole again. Jeanette was born in the United States a decade later. Her father passed away in 2020. When asked to describe him in one word, she answers immediately: devoted.

Growing up, her parents didn’t dwell on Cuba. What they communicated instead was what Cuba had been before Castro — a country with color television, advanced medicine, real innovation — and what the revolution destroyed. “To see what happened to that island,” she says, “is devastating.” She has never stepped foot there. Her parents never went back.

She came to Florida International University as a student, earning her Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Political Science and her Master of Public Administration from the institution. She went to work in government relations at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where watching decisions being made in Tallahassee about healthcare funding and policy convinced her she had something to add. In 2010, she ran for the Florida House of Representatives and won. She served eight years as a State Representative before being elected Lieutenant Governor of Florida in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, overseeing the Florida Department of Health and chairing Space Florida and the state’s Cybersecurity Advisory Council.

In 2025, the FIU Board of Trustees voted unanimously to name her the university’s seventh president, confirmed by the Florida Board of Governors on June 18, 2025. She is now responsible for 55,000 students at the university where she was once a student herself. “I wouldn’t get to be president,” she says, “without being an FIU student at one point.” The path was not linear. The destination was.