Benny Frankie Cerezo

Benny Frankie Cerezo served as a member of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives between 1969 and 1973. Elected in 1968 under the banner of the newly founded New Progressive Party at an early age, incoming Speaker Angel Viera Martínez appointed him to chair one of the House's two most powerful committees, the Government Affairs Committee. Cerezo came out against the Vietnam conflict and ended up losing his chairmanship, ending his elective career.

He helped found "Avance", along with several other political mavericks, including Juan Manuel García Passalacqua and Noel Colón Martínez a Puerto Rican newsweekly magazine that attempted to provide a heavy dose of political analysis before folding. Since then, Cerezo has earned a living as a highly regarded trial attorney but has devoted time to his passion of serving as a political analyst for several radio and TV stations in Puerto Rico.

From 1989 to 1991, Cerezo once again collaborated briefly with the pro-statehood New Progressive Party when he accepted party president Carlos Romero Barceló's invitation to spearhead the party's lobbying efforts to get Congress to approve a bill providing for a referendum in Puerto Rico on political status options. Cerezo put together a group of ad hoc volunteer lobbyists, including Romero, legendary party founder Luis A. Ferré, in his late 80's at the time, as well as a younger cadre that included attorney Carlos Díaz Olivo, now a law professor, businessman Cesar Cabrera, now a United States Ambassador, and Kenneth McClintock, currently the territory's Senate president. When Pedro Rosselló became party president and Cerezo questioned many of Rossello's policies, Cerezo once again withdrew from collaborating with the NPP.

He is married to Federal District Judge Carmen Consuelo Vargas and is the father of one daughter and one son, a partner in a Miami law firm.