Word: havana
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Alberto Beguiristain was once ready to risk his life to regain what he lost in Cuba. In 1960, a year after Fidel Castro took power, the revolution confiscated Beguiristain's large Spanish colonial house and two sugar mills in Sagua la Grande, east of Havana. Beguiristain recalls the "restitution" Castro offered: "He said I could leave the island alive." So in 1961, working for the CIA, Beguiristain ran the first arms shipments from Florida to anti-Castro insurgents for their disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He was captured and says he would have been executed had he not escaped...
...Castro, who turns 80 August 13 and is, say official communiques, recovering from major intestinal surgery, last week handed provisional power to his younger brother and defense minister, Raul Castro. At first, Miami's politically potent Cuban exiles exulted in the streets of Little Havana. But when the reality sunk in that Fidel is most likely still alive - and that his communist dictatorship may 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...
...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...
...That issue could be moot anyway. Cuban-Americans a generation ago may have waxed romantic about their gorgeous and breezy casas in Havana 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...
...years in power, Fidel, who turns 80 on August 13, has never ceded power like this to anyone. And when asked why, if Fidel really is still alive, he would so uncharacteristically let aides make such an important announcement rather than do it himself, reliable official sources in Havana insist that convalescence from his intestinal surgery requires that he do absolutely nothing but lie still in the following days, not even read a communiqu?...