Rene Murai’s s family story begins in Budapest. His father, a physician who had graduated from the University of Vienna medical school, fled Hungary in 1939 on the eve of World War II and made his way to Cuba, where his uncle, also a physician, had already settled. In Havana. He met and married Sylvia Muniz and started a branch of the pharmaceutical company for which he had worked in Budapest. When the war made it impossible to import products from Hungary, he started his own company.

Rene was sent to Culver Military Academy in Indiana as Havana grew unstable and dangerous. From there he went to Brown University, then Columbia Law School, where he graduated cum laude in 1969. At Columbia he served as Managing Editor of the Columbia Law Review and was named a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar — the school’s highest academic honor. He was a parolee — not a citizen, not a resident, technically present at the pleasure of the U.S. government – and yet the Cuban Loan Program of 1964 financed half his tuition. “What other country does this?” he says. “This is the most generous country there is.”

When he applied for judicial clerkships in New York after Columbia, he was rejected repeatedly. He opened a recommendation from a professor one day. It said his prose “showed traces of his Hispanic background.” He understood immediately what any judge reading that would conclude. He abandoned the clerkship search, and joined the Legal Services Program in Miami instead. There, together with two colleagues, he took up the case of a Cuban named Margarita Fuentes, whose stove and record player had been repossessed without notice or a hearing. The case, Fuentes v. Shevin, was decided in her favor by the United States Supreme Court in 1972, striking down repossession laws in nearly every state in the country. Margarita Fuentes was on the front page of the Miami Herald and on the CBS evening news the next day.

After Legal Services, he worked at a Wall Street law firm before returning to Miami and eventually founding his law firm, Murai Wald Biondo & Moreno, where he practiced with the same partners for 40 years. When the firm dissolved in 2021, he was not ready to retire and joined the Avila law firm, where he practices today.

There is one more thread in this story that only the CV reveals. Rene is married to Luisa Botifoll Murai — the daughter of Luis Botifoll, one of the four co-founders of FACE. The organization he has served since its earliest days is not just a civic commitment. It is, in the most literal sense, family. He served as FACE’s President in 1989 and has remained a Director ever since. He has also been honored as a FACE Excellence Award recipient — recognized by the very organization he helped build.

His civic record spans decades: Chairman of the Board of Directors of Miami Children’s Hospital (now, Nicklaus Children’s Hospital), President of the Cuban American Bar Association, President of the Florida Bar Foundation, Trustee of the University of Miami, recipient of the Supreme Court of Florida’s Statewide Pro Bono Award for his representation of Guantanamo detainees, and director of the Orange Bowl Committee. As he settled in Miami, the city grew around him into something he and his parents could not have imagined when they arrived in 1960.