Eduardo González
The Council of Ministers yesterday appointed Luis Manuel Cuesta Civís to the post of Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, replacing Celsa Nuño.
The new Undersecretary will therefore inherit some of the pending issues left by Celsa Nuño in her barely fourteen months in office: the vaccination of personnel posted abroad, a commitment of the previous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, which the current Minister, José Manuel Albares, has begun to correct through the Ministry’s International Vaccination Center; and the return of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to its former location in the building in Plaza Marqués de Salamanca, scheduled for the end of this year.
Born in La Pobla de Segur (Lleida) in 1968, Luis Cuesta entered the diplomatic career in 1993, after which he served as Counselor for Cultural Promotion at the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and as a UNDP expert in New York. He was also posted to the Spanish Embassies in Bogota and Rome.
During the Socialist Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, he worked in the Ministry of Defense. Between 2005 and 2007, he was advisor for international affairs in the Cabinet of the Minister of Defense (with José Bono and José Antonio Alonso) and, between 2007 and 2012, he served as Secretary General of Defense Policy in the Ministry of Defense (with Alonso and, fundamentally, with Carme Chacón). In the Ministry of Defense, Cuesta coincided with the recently appointed Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau, then Director of Cabinet of the Secretary of State for Defense and predecessor, precisely, of Celsa Nuño as Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Cuesta has also been Spain’s ambassador to Tanzania (also accredited to Rwanda and Burundi and to the East African Community, between 2012-2015), deputy permanent representative for political-military affairs at the Permanent Representation of Spain to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and, since April 1, 2019 and to date, ambassador permanent representative of Spain to the OSCE, based in Vienna.
Luis Cuesta speaks Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Italian and holds the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic and the Cross of Police Merit with white badge. He is also Commander of the Order of Civil Merit, Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity and Knight of the Legion of Honor of the French Republic.
