Word: cuba
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...Today Beguiristain, 72, who owns an insurance agency in Miami, still wants his Cuba property, which he values in the tens of millions of dollars. But after almost five decades, he hears that his house has been torn down and one of his mills dismantled. He concedes that when Castro dies, he probably won't be hopping into an armed speedboat to rescue his ancestral patrimony, as some exiles once threatened to do; instead he'll be retaining a high-powered attorney, hoping to broker some sort of compensation settlement from a transition government. "I want to take part...
...well endure under Raul even if he's not - it also reminded many Cuban-Americans that their once ardent hopes of reclaiming confiscated property could be, as one Pentagon analyst says, "a pipe dream." A report last month by the Bush Administration's Commission For Assistance to a Free Cuba warns, "No issue will be more fraught with difficulty and complexity" during the post-Castro transition - even if democracy is eventually restored on the island...
...scores of U.S. corporations, assets whose combined worth was $9 billion in 1960 and perhaps more than $50 billion today. (It was, in fact, the single biggest grab of U.S.-owned property in history.) When Fidel offered little if any restitution, the U.S. retaliated with an economic embargo against Cuba in 1962, which remains in place today...
...years later, as Cuban-Americans continue to clutch yellowing deeds and titles, the likelihood of ever recovering the actual properties has dimmed like a Havana brownout. No one knows how many houses in Cuba are still claimed by exiles; but more than one family often occupies each home there, especially since housing construction in impoverished Cuba is light-years behind the island's population growth. If Cuban-Americans show up in even a democratized Cuba demanding those dwellings, they're likely to face the wrath of Cubans who tend to resent imperious exiles as much as they disdain Fidel. Says...
...neighborhoods like Miramar. But today, says Elena Freyre, head of the Cuban-American Defense League in Miami, "90% of them no longer desire to go back and live there. Their roots are too deep in the U.S. And when they go back and see the sad reality of what Cuba is now, a lot of them will be on the first flight back to Miami...