Gov. Sonny Perdue has ordered flags at the state Capitol to fly at half-staff Saturday in memory of Georgia state Rep. Tony Sellier, R-Fort Valley, who died Nov. 30 at a Peach County hospital. He was 65.
Though he had spent more than 30 years in Middle Georgia, Mr. Sellier had an international heritage. He was born in Trinidad to a Frenchman and a Trinidadian woman of Italian and Venezuelan descent. After World War II his family moved to Venezuela, where his father worked for Mobil Oil Co.
Even before his election to the General Assembly in 2006, Mr. Sellier was a strong advocate for expanding U.S. trade ties with Cuba. He returned to the country last year with a Georgia trade delegation, 50 years after getting his first glimpse of the country at 15 years old.
In 1960, at his parents' insistence, Mr. Sellier fled a revolution in Venezuela and headed for Florida, where he was to enroll at Catholic boarding school. On the way, the plane carrying the family landed in Havana to pick up passengers leaving the country. It was a quick stop, but the memory of the Jose Marti International Airport was "indelible," he told GlobalAtlanta during an interview in September 2009.
Through the windows, he saw soldiers with guns taking the belongings of those who were boarding to flee the Cuban revolution.
"They didn't allow any of us to get off, but allowed what Cubans had seats to get on, and that's when I saw the real drama going on on the ground," he said. When the plane landed in the U.S., many of the Cuban passengers kissed the ground.
"I was just a really protected kid until I saw that, and that was my first experience with life and death things," he said.
Mr. Sellier became a U.S. citizen in 1973. In 1975 he moved to Middle Georgia, where he worked in the international division for school bus manufacturer Blue Bird Corp., a position he held for three decades. When he returned to Cuba with the trade delegation last year, the Cuban capital's airport seemed just like he remembered. The paint color hadn't even changed, he said.
It was the same for the country, which seemed frozen in time.
“I actually saw farmers plowing with wooden plows and oxen and mules,” he said, noting that the country still hasn't fully recovered from collapse of the Soviet Union, which helped bankroll the Cuban regime for years.
Mr. Sellier believed that the U.S. should remove 50-year-old embargo that keeps U.S. companies from exporting products besides medicine, food and telecommunications equipment to Cuba. He also believed that travel restrictions should be removed.
Those moves would have significant implications for Georgia, which is already the largest state exporter of chicken to Cuba. Each of the past seven years, the state's agriculture department has sent a delegation to build ties with Cuba's biggest customer: it's government, which rations food to the population.
"It would be a far greater service to our country, and particularly Georgia, if they would let us do more business with them, and obviously the effect in Cuba would be a positive one; the people like us anyway," he said.
That said, Mr. Sellier respected the tradition of honest and open debate in the U.S., which is salient to him as someone who grew up in a place where people weren't free to say what they pleased.
"I'm a U.S. citizen now, thank God. I'm proud of the way we debate. It may not be pretty sometimes, but it's a direct sign of the freedom that our country grants its citizens," he said.
A fluent Spanish speaker, Mr. Sellier was involved in work with his church's migrant ministry in addition to his involvement with a variety of other charitable organizations.
The funeral is scheduled for Saturday, Dec. 4.
