Former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Cuban immigrant from Miami who spent nearly two decades serving his south Florida congressional district and the brother of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, died Monday.

The cause was cancer, his son told the Miami Herald. He was 70.

“It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Lincoln Diaz-Balart,” Mario Diaz-Balart said in a statement announcing his brother’s death. “Lincoln’s profound love for the United States, and his relentless commitment to the cause of a free Cuba, guided him throughout his life and his 24 years in elected public service, including 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who served in the House from 1993 to 2011, co-founded the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute in 2003.

In 1994, he became the first Hispanic lawmaker in history to be named to the powerful House Rules Committee. In 1996, he helped to draft legislation that strengthened the U.S. embargo against the Cuban dictatorship.

He was the author of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997, which granted legal residency to hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States who were previously at risk of deportation.

In a 2011 CQ member profile, he was described as a “skilled inside player who moves easily in the arcane world of House rules and can be persuasive in face-to-face meetings.”

“His career-long quest has been to rid Cuba of its Communist government, but he hopes to be known for more,” that profile read.

Originally a Democrat, Lincoln Diaz-Balart changed parties in 1985 after serving as the co-chairman of the Democrats for Reagan campaign in Florida. He was elected to the state Legislature in 1986, serving three years in the House and three in the Senate.

In 2006, he was among a small minority of Republicans who voted against legislation to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and to classify illegal immigrants as criminals. In 2007, he publicly endorsed legislation that would allow illegal immigrant students to pay in-state tuition at public universities and colleges, a measure opposed by much of the GOP caucus.

And he was one of the few Republican House members in 1994 who declined to sign the GOP’s “Contract with America,” because of a provision that would have cut off benefits to legal immigrants.

The Diaz-Balart brothers hail from a prominent family of prerevolutionary politicians who fled Cuba when Fidel Castro took power.

Their grandfather, father and uncle served in Cuba’s House before the family fled to the United States in 1959, the year of the revolution, when Lincoln was 5.

His father’s sister was married to Castro in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but they divorced and a falling-out between the families ensued.

He was preceded in death by his first son, Lincoln Gabriel, and is survived by his wife, Cristina; his son Daniel and daughter-in-law Estefania; grandsons Lincoln Daniel and Edwin Rafael; brothers Rafael, Jose and Mario; and their wives, Elba, Brenda and Tia.