A Darker Look at Che's Revolution
http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-08-06/news/a-darker-look-at-che-s-revolution?src=newsletter
After Guevara destroyed his family and his fortune, Gustavo Villoldo
hunted the revolutionary leader to his grave.
By Tim Elfrink
Published on August 04, 2009
Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous beret is gone. His iconic beard is
filthy and matted against skeletal cheekbones. Bushy eyebrows arch
over his half-open eyes.
As a Bolivian country surgeon methodically saws off his lifeless
hands, Che appears vaguely amused.
Gustavo Villoldo, a stocky figure in green army fatigues, stands just
inside the tiny laundry room where the Cuban revolutionary's corpse
rests atop a sink. For five months, the CIA operative led soldiers
hunting Guevara through the rough crags and valleys of southern
Bolivia. Less than 24 hours ago, his team captured and executed him
in the village of La Higuera and then brought his body here to Vallegrande.
Gustavo watches the olive-skinned doctor take notes in a small
notebook. One bullet wound to the left collarbone. Another in the
right collarbone, causing a compound fracture. Three slugs in the
dorsal region around the rib cage. A ragged hole in the left
pectoral. A bullet in the right calf. A graze wound on the inner
thigh. A bullet through the forearm. Several shots crisscrossed his
asthmatic lungs and lodged in his vertebrae. Che died, the surgeon
notes, from hemorrhaging in the chest.
Gustavo stares at the body. He thinks of all the deaths Che has
caused, from Havana to Bolivia to the Congo. He imagines all the
Cuban patriots the revolutionary leader has killed.
Patriots like Gustavo's own father.
Gustavo has trailed Che for more than two years, from the jungles of
the Congo to the windy Bolivian altiplano. But looking at the bloody,
emaciated corpse, he feels mostly tired and sad.
The surgeon finishes his autopsy. He lifts prints off Che's amputated
hands evidence of the kill.
It's a little after 8 p.m. In Havana, Fidel Castro is already
planning a hero's funeral and martyr's welcome to greet Guevara's
remains. Gustavo won't let that happen. He heads to a nearby safe
house. Just after midnight, he changes into jeans and a dark Bolivian
sweater and then tucks a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol into the
waistband. Silently, he walks through the darkness to the laundry
room, where he meets two Bolivians. They hoist Che and two other dead
revolutionaries onto a truck and cover the bodies with a canvas.
A light drizzle blows out of the mountains and glazes the grass as
they drive to a jungle airport. Next to the pitch-dark landing strip,
a small bulldozer waits near a hole; it's 15 feet deep and 30 feet wide.
Gustavo and the two men grab the canvas and flip the three bodies
into the wet earth. A hard rain falls as the bulldozer pushes dirt
over the corpses. By morning, Che Guevara's unmarked grave is soaked
and invisible.
Gustavo's mission in Bolivia is complete. But his personal war
against the men who killed his father, stole his family's fortune and
drove him from his homeland is far from finished.
The story of his lifelong crusade against Castro and Guevara which
has never before been reported in full is remarkable. It begins
with a childhood among Havana's elite and continues with a narrow
escape from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a daring 1971 invasion of a
Cuban fishing village. Recently, he struck a new, resounding blow at
Castro when he and his brother Alfredo won the largest civil judgment
leveled against the Cuban government for $1 billion. They had sued
the dictator for stealing the Villoldo estate, tearing apart their
family and killing their dad.
After all of this, Gustavo's legacy is still in dispute. There's
little question that, as former top CIA analyst Brian Latell puts it,
he played a "very critical role in the capture of Che Guevara." But
while some exiles consider Gustavo a hero, Che fans and scholars such
as UCLA's Peter McLaren call him a "narrow-minded ideologue who set
out to avenge his father and took his anger out on a great man."
--
Gustavo's parents, Margarita and Gustavo Sr., descended from wealthy
Spaniards and grew up in Havana's high society. In the early 1920s,
Gustavo Sr. graduated from the Wharton School of Business in
Pennsylvania, moved home and started a successful law firm in Havana.
By the time the younger Gustavo was born on January 21, 1936, his
family owned a 30,000-acre farm in northwest Cuba as well as a
General Motors plant. Alfredo was born the next year.
When Gustavo was only 11 years old, his papi taught him to fly a
Piper airplane. The boy took the controls on just his third flight as
Gustavo Sr. sat next to him. Before the fourth ascent, his father
said simply, "Well, come back soon," and sent his son up alone.
Later that year, Gustavo boarded a commercial flight from Havana to
Miami and then headed for South Bend, Indiana, where he enrolled in
the Culver Military Academy. The boarding school was among the finest
in America. Its inspector general was Omar Bradley, the legendary
World War II leader.
Culver boys awoke every morning to military drills and tactical
training. Between classes, they learned to fix Jeep engines, scale
walls and fire rifles. Gustavo thrived. At age 16, he moved on to a
military boarding school in Georgia for another two years. His
roommate there was Roberto Garcia, another Cuban who would eventually
serve alongside him in the Bay of Pigs.
"Even then, Gustavo was a leader among the cadets," Garcia remembers.
Gustavo returned to Havana in 1952 to join his father's GM auto
empire as a mechanic. For the next six years, he worked at car
dealerships during the day and attended business classes at the
University of Havana in the evenings. He lived with his parents at a
palatial waterfront home in the Miramar neighborhood. It was among
the first in Cuba with central air-conditioning.
On weekends, Gustavo traveled three hours to a sprawling farm where
he cared for horses and helped with the harvest. He also played
baseball and tennis and swam at a private club.
Salvador Miralles, another Bay of Pigs veteran, competed against
Gustavo on baseball diamonds and tennis courts. Though Castro arrived
in Cuba on the yacht the Granma in 1956 to jump-start revolution on
the island, Gustavo wasn't concerned with politics, Miralles says.
"[He] cared about getting drunk, chasing girls, racing cars," the
five-foot-four-inch vet remembers.
Then rebels broke into a Villoldo dealership in Santiago during late
1958 and stole more than 20 cars. Twenty-three-year-old Gustavo
crossed the country to survey the damage. Guerrillas stopped him
eight times at checkpoints, and he returned home shaken.
A few days later, Gustavo joined his father at a top government
minister's wedding. There he met President Fulgencio Batista and
began describing the harrowing journey. Before he could finish,
though, Batista's defense chief, General Francisco Tabernilla Dolz,
burst out, "Don't believe this kid! It's not true."
Perhaps Batista should have listened. A few months later, in January
1959, Castro's forces glided into Havana. Gustavo Sr. was
interrogated about his ties to the United States and Batista.
One day in late January 1959, Gustavo received a frantic call from
his brother Alfredo. Dozens of bearded guerrillas had surrounded his
home. Gustavo ran over. When he arrived, the guerrillas yelled,
"That's the older Villoldo kid!" and threw him in the back of a Jeep.
For three days, the rebels interrogated Gustavo, trying to force him
to implicate his father as an American agent or a traitor. The boy
refused. Finally, he was released. The reason, he says: The rebels
were disorganized and the prison wasn't yet controlled by Che Guevara.
Over the next two weeks, guerrillas frequently stormed the Villoldo
home. They pointed machine guns at Gustavo, assaulted his mother and
interrogated his father.
Before Castro's revolution, Villoldo GM dealerships turned an annual
profit of $15 million, and the family owned homes in Miramar, Baracoa
and Varadero, next door to the Kennedy family's property there.
The rebels wanted all of it. Guevara personally visited Gustavo's
father twice. The second visit came on the morning of February 15,
1959. Gustavo was with his dad at the family's business headquarters
in downtown Havana. Che and bearded guards entered his father's
office and closed the door.
"I knew he was a murderer and a thug," Gustavo recalls in a gravelly
Spanish drawl. "You can tell that just by how someone acts."
The visit deeply disturbed Gustavo Sr. That evening, he took his son
on a walk along the waterfront. He said Che had issued an ultimatum:
Either Gustavo Sr. could die and forfeit the family's fortune to the
state, or it would be el paredón death by firing squad for his two sons.
Gustavo didn't know it at the time, but his father was saying goodbye.
The next morning, the boy awoke to his mother's frantic cries. He ran
to the study and found his dad slumped over a spare bed. An empty jar
of sleeping pills sat on the desk.
The young man wept. Then he vowed revenge. Che would die, and Castro would pay.
--
Gustavo strained against his parachute pack and the canvas straps
holding him in the copilot's seat inside the narrow B-26 cockpit. He
stared at the starboard wing, painted the red, white and blue of the
Cuban flag. A three-foot torpedo filled with napalm hung there. It
should have dropped to the ground by now.
"Try it again," Gustavo told the pilot, a tall American airman named
Connie "Sig" Seigrist. Sig flipped the B-26 on its side and wagged
the wing back and forth over the Bay of Pigs' aquamarine waters
thousands of feet below. Though they tried desperately to dislodge
the bomb, it wouldn't budge.
"We've got two options, Gus," Seigrist said, looking him in the eye.
"We can bail out, or we can try to land this thing. If we land,
there's a good chance we could end up barbecue."
It was April 18, 1961, and on the ground below, hundreds of Gustavo's
comrades were dying as the botched Bay of Pigs invasion spiraled out
of control.
Gustavo and Sig decided parachuting out would be more dangerous than
landing with the napalm. Almost everyone who jumped from a B-26
midflight got sucked into the tail and crushed.
"Let's land it," Gustavo finally said.
As the plane angled west over the Caribbean, Gustavo pondered how he
had ended up in this cockpit. He had escaped Cuba a month after his
father's death by bribing his way into traveling papers and a flight
to Miami. Within weeks of landing, he met other anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
The small group talked a Cuban banker into lending them a Piper
Apache for bombing runs over the island. Then they built homemade explosives.
Police arrested them before they could make a single run. As the men
awaited trial, CIA operatives asked if they wanted to train for a
covert invasion of their homeland.
Charges were dropped and they all signed up.
"I hated the men who had killed my father," Gustavo says. "I didn't
care about democracy because it didn't really mean anything to me at
that point. It wasn't about politics. It was personal."
In February 1960, a few months after Gustavo left Cuba, his brother
Alfredo fled to Miami. Gustavo's wife, Elia along with the couple's
three young children, Gustavo Alfredo, Eduardo, and Elia Mercedes
also made her way to the Magic City.
It wasn't easy to fight a war and keep a family together. Gustavo
leaned on Alfredo for help. "His family didn't know everything he was
doing, but I always did," Alfredo says. "His wife did know the Bay of
Pigs would be a huge risk, but Gustavo trusted me to watch over his
family if he was killed."
Gustavo was a natural for the senior ranks of Brigade 2506, as the
exile invasion force called itself. When the fighters relocated to
Guatemala and then a U.S. base in Nicaragua for the final stages,
Gustavo became the force's head of security.
He was supremely confident of victory. In early 1961, he even allowed
Elia and their three children to move back to Havana. "I was stupid
and blind," Gustavo says. "I wanted them to be in Cuba when we
liberated the country. It was all I could think about."
By April 15, 1961, the planned first day of the offensive on Cuba,
the fighters began to realize President Kennedy had lost his nerve.
But they went ahead anyway. At first, Gustavo stayed in Nicaragua.
Three days later, a call went out for volunteers. Air crews were
exhausted. "They'd already been giving us speed to keep us going,"
Miralles remembers. "We were totally drained."
American pilots were ready to fly, the officer told them, but each
plane needed a Cuban copilot.
Six hours later, Gustavo found himself strapped next to Sig, flying
toward an uncertain landing with live napalm dangling from his wing.
He didn't regret volunteering for the mission. But he already felt
bitter at Kennedy's betrayal. Good men were dying.
As Sig circled the runway, Gustavo could almost feel the napalm
exploding and burning away his flesh. When the wheels touched down,
the loose bomb dragged on the tarmac, kicking up sparks.
But it didn't blow. Afterward, Gustavo sat on the jungle runway and
cried for the invasion gone wrong, for his homeland, for his family
trapped in Havana and for his father.
--
Gustavo was ready to give up the fight. He flew once more with Sig,
on the last aerial mission of the invasion, called the "Lobo Flight,"
which annihilated a column of Castro's army. Then he spent two weeks
at the Nicaraguan base, nicknamed "Happy Valley," preparing to return
home to Miami.
Before he could leave, a CIA officer approached him with an offer:
Work for the agency and keep fighting. In exchange, his wife and
children would be smuggled from Havana.
He agreed. "I thought it could be a jumping-off point to what I
wanted to accomplish," Gustavo says. After earning a commission as an
Army second lieutenant, he officially joined the agency in 1964.
Meanwhile, his family flew to Miami with CIA assistance in the mid
'60s and moved into a home in Hialeah. In the next few years, Gustavo
and Elia had three more children: Ana Maria, Alejandro and Patricia.
"It wasn't easy keeping a family together with a life like this,"
Gustavo says with dry understatement.
He declines to discuss much of his undercover work. He claims he
successfully infiltrated Cuba between 30 and 40 times for the CIA
an account his former station chief, who recently died, confirmed to
a Miami Herald reporter in 1997. Gustavo says he played a
"significant role" in the Iran-Contra scandal. "I'm lucky I never got
called to testify to Congress," he says.
One thing never changed, though. As Gustavo flitted from spying on
leftists in Guatemala to rebels in Ecuador, he never forgot the role
Che Guevara played in unraveling his family.
After the Cuban Revolution, Che was the public face of the revolt.
Then, in 1965, Castro appointed his number two man to spread Marxist
revolution around the developing world. Che vowed to create "a
hundred Vietnams."
When the CIA learned the Cuban leader was assisting a Marxist
revolution in the Congo, Gustavo quickly volunteered to track him. He
spent three months in the equatorial backwater, listening to
Guevara's radio messages and closing in on his position. But Che
became ill and dispirited only a year into his conquest and then fled
to Tanzania. "He got out of the Congo with pure luck," Gustavo scoffs.
Two years later, Che flew to Bolivia to try to inspire a peasant
revolt. Gustavo followed, traveling from Miami to La Paz in August
1967. He was accompanied by Félix Rodríguez, another Bay of Pigs vet
working for the CIA.
Rodríguez is often painted as the leader of the CIA's efforts in
Bolivia. In Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, author Jon Lee
Anderson writes that the CIA summoned Rodríguez to Washington to
spearhead its effort in Bolivia, and notes Gustavo was already in La Paz.
But Gustavo maintains he ran the operation. Rodríguez was just a
"radio operator," he says. Their feud is legendary among older exiles
and in a way typical of the internecine squabbling that eventually
divided the brigade. "If you talk to Félix Rodríguez for this
story," Gustavo says, "you are not authorized to use my interview."
Rodríguez, who lives in Miami, declined to comment. Declassified CIA
documents also confirm both men worked with the Army Rangers-trained
Bolivian team hunting Che's band of rebels. "I don't know which was
more important on the ground," says Latell, the former CIA analyst.
"But certainly their efforts on behalf of the U.S. were key to
Bolivian forces capturing Che."
Posing as a Bolivian army officer named Captain Eduardo González,
Gustavo says, he had the full blessing of Bolivia's president, René
Barrientos. In fact, at a dinner with Barrientos, Gustavo says, he
retold the story of his father's death. He recalls telling the
recently elected president: "If you tell me now that you plan to
return Che to Cuba after you capture him, I'm boarding the next plane
back to Miami."
Barrientos was quiet for a moment. Then, according to Gustavo, he
said, "You have my word, from the president of Bolivia, that if we
capture Guevara, he will not leave Bolivia alive."
Gustavo spent the next two months tramping through the desolate Andes
of southern Bolivia, passing intelligence to Langley. He lost nearly
40 pounds. On October 7, a unit outside the town of La Higuera
finally cornered Che in a canyon and captured him alive.
Gustavo was on the road back to Vallegrande, where top Bolivian
officials had been coordinating the hunt. Félix Rodríguez was with
the team that took Guevara into custody and interrogated the rebel
the next day. On October 9, Bolivian soldiers acting on Barrientos's
order executed Guevara, riddling his body with semiautomatic rifle bullets.
Che's body was then flown by helicopter to Vallegrande. As Gustavo
stared at the lifeless frame in that tiny laundry room, he thought
back to the conversation with Barrientos.
"I like to think the president remembered my story of what happened
to my father," he says. "I like to think it influenced him [to give
the order] to kill Che."
--
By 1971, Gustavo was back in Hialeah, living with Elia and his six
kids. As winter turned to spring, an old CIA contact in Washington
called Gustavo in for a meeting. (He declined to name any of these
contacts.) The Vietnam War was winding down. Soviet interest in Cuba
was waning. The embattled Nixon administration needed a victory
against communism. To both Gustavo and the agent, it seemed an
opportune time for a plan they had been hatching for years: an armed
invasion of Cuba. The aim would be to take over a small town as a
trial run for a larger attack and as a propaganda coup against Castro.
"Remember that mission you've always wanted to make happen?" Gustavo
remembers the contact asking. "Consider this the famous green light
to go ahead."
The then-35-year-old exile wasted little time. Within three months,
he'd raised $350,000, recruited 50 men for the mission and chosen a
target: Boca de Sama, a tiny fishing village in eastern Cuba. Only
one road ran into the jumble of wooden shacks, which housed just a
few dozen people. It figured to be an easy target.
On October 12, 1971, Gustavo led the men out of a Key Biscayne harbor
on two fast boats and a 177-foot frigate the crew nicknamed El Melón
for the way it rolled side to side in the slightest chop.
As Gustavo organized the operation on the boat's deck, a 20-commando
team raided the village. They killed at least two men: a 32-year-old
local official and a 24-year-old militiaman. According to a Cuban
radio report, the team also wounded two other men, and two teenage
girls were hurt in the crossfire.
About 75 minutes after they landed, the Miami exiles hauled out of
town and back to sea. None was killed.
Seaweed saved them during the retreat, Gustavo says. The slimy plant
entangled the rotors on all of the boats, slowing them to a crawl as
they fled back to Florida. Castro assumed they were cruising north at
full speed. Helicopters and planes searched for the men far into the
Straits of Florida. Nightfall concealed their escape home.
A Miami Herald story filed the day after the raid confirms Gustavo's
version of the operation. In a fiery speech November 23, Fidel Castro
personally condemned the Boca de Sama invasion, calling it a "pirate
raid," noting one of the wounded teenagers had her foot amputated,
and pledging that "the responsibility for these cowardly and bloody
incidents falls on the U.S. government and its confederates."
None of the reports mentions Gustavo by name. He was still an
undercover CIA operative at the time, he says, so he remained out of
the limelight. Juan Cosculluela, another member of the team, confirms
Gustavo planned and oversaw the operation. "I served in the Navy, and
I can say that Gustavo was as good a leader on this team as I've seen
in any operation," he says.
Others dispute his role. José Garcia, another volunteer, says only,
"Gustavo abandoned all of us," before hanging up the phone.
"It was a successful mission in every respect," Gustavo counters.
"Especially in the sense that it was funded, planned and executed
completely by Cubans."
A follow-up, larger invasion never happened. Gustavo blames political
divisions in the exile community, "like those demonstrated by José [Garcia]."
Gustavo claims that after Boca de Sama, he continued to work with the
CIA around Latin America and the Caribbean through the '70s and '80s.
But he declines to give details.
It's clearer that he established construction, development, fishing,
farming and banking businesses in Miami. He even imported spiny
lobster from the Bahamas. The Florida Division of Corporations lists
Gustavo Villoldo as the registered owner of 21 firms. And he was
named in 19 civil lawsuits between 1973 and 1999 related to his
business ventures. Records of virtually all of them have been
destroyed. "Every businessman has problems," he says. "I am no different."
Gustavo also established himself in Alaska, where he traveled on a
CIA operation he won't discuss and fell in love with the rugged
landscape. He started a fishing venture and began buying land on
Amook Island, a remote spit of land in the Bering Sea. He owns around
300 acres worth about $150,000, according to Alaska property records.
As his businesses flourished, Gustavo's personal life suffered. All
the years he threw himself into his fight against Castro left him
distant from Elia and their kids. He has built a hard shell around
this part of his life. "My commitment to bringing down Castro was
certainly a factor," Gustavo concedes. "But people also change. I
changed a lot through all those years fighting."
In 1977, the strain was too much. Elia filed for divorce in the
Dominican Republic, where Gustavo had temporarily relocated the
family while pursuing a business venture. He remarried two years
later, to a woman named Maria. They had one son, Rafael, but that
marriage also fell apart under the strain of a life at war. They
divorced in 1983.
Court records of the divorces contain no indication of the reason for
the breakups.
"I would say he was a good father to me," Rafael Villoldo says. "He
cared passionately about what he did, and he taught us to do the same
with our lives."
Gustavo withdrew from public life. He says he feared retribution over
his CIA work, but all the personal tumult might have been a factor as
well. In the mid '80s, he bought a mango grove in deep South
Miami-Dade County and lived at the unlisted address. It was
accessible only through winding dirt roads. He kept his phone number
unpublished.
He left the CIA for good in 1988. The agency doesn't discuss former
operatives, so the period of his service is difficult to verify. In
1990, he wedded a woman named Patricia, to whom he's still married.
Even as a gentleman mango farmer, he didn't give up his struggle. In
1998, after a Spanish judge arrested former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, Gustavo collected signatures to mount similar charges against Castro.
The effort failed. But it spurred Gustavo to think of the U.S.
justice system as another weapon.
--
Last year Gustavo sold his grove, and today he lives quietly in a new
orange townhouse in West Kendall. Three blocks west of his home, the
pavement ends and the waterlogged Everglades stretches off to the
horizon. He's still not listed in the phone book or property records.
Six months of the year, he fishes and hunts on Amook Island, where
his nearest neighbor is more than 100 miles away by seaplane.
The mementos of a lifetime of struggle hang on the walls of his home:
a framed display of yellowed photos from the invasion of Boca de
Sama; a faded red and black "26 de Julio" armband, taken from a Cuban
prisoner; an oil painting of his last flight with Sig Seigrist over
the Bay of Pigs.
Gustavo walks slowly around the house, staring through watery eyes at
the memories.
He pulls out a manila file folder. Inside are some court documents.
They're less impressive than the keepsakes from the Bay of Pigs but
they're evidence of a much more successful operation.
"This is my fight for justice, for my father," he says.
Gustavo's legal battle traces back to 1959, when Castro seized
businesses and bank accounts from thousands of Cubans. In response,
President Eisenhower froze all Cuban funds and created a commission
to sort through exiles' claims. It certified 5,911 of them worth
$1.85 billion at the time. But those first efforts were stuck in
limbo until 1996, when Congress passed a law in the wake of the
Oklahoma City bombings. It allowed suits against foreign governments
for terrorist attacks.
Miami's exiles jumped on the law. The families of pilots who flew for
Brothers to the Rescue, which used small planes to save Cuban
rafters, sued after Cuban MiGs shot down two planes and killed four
pilots. They won $187.6 million in 2001.
Two years ago, Gustavo began totaling his family's holdings at the
time of the revolution. The GM dealerships' repairs and parts sales
totaled about $20 million in 1958. A trading company earned about
$411,000. The Villoldoses's various properties the three homes,
30,000-acre ranch and 113-unit apartment building were worth close
to $100 million.
Add it all up, top it off with a 6 percent interest rate, and the
value is $393 million. The decision to file suit wasn't easy. Both
Alfredo and Gustavo still awoke to images of their father dead in his
study. "I have this dream where my father is drowning in the sea and
I'm racing on the beach, trying to get to him, but I can't get
through the sand," says Alfredo, the more sensitive and vocal of the brothers.
"It was all about our father," Gustavo adds. "This is about justice,
about holding them accountable for what they did to a human being."
On March 18, 2008, they filed an 11-page complaint demanding
restitution. "Defendants Fidel Castro Ruiz [and Che] Guevara...are
liable for damages arising from the systematic physical and emotional
destruction of [Gustavo Sr.] that culminated in him committing
suicide," the suit claimed.
The brothers' case finally went to trial this past May 28. On the
stand before Judge Peter Adrien, Gustavo wept as he showed
photographs of his family. He broke down as he described the walk he
took with his father the night before his suicide. As in all the
other cases, the Cuban government did not defend itself.
The next day, Adrien told a packed courtroom what he thought about
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's role in Gustavo Sr.'s death: "What the
defendants did is torture this family and tear it apart."
Adrien awarded the Villoldo brothers the full $393 million for family
assets, another $392 million for pain and suffering and $393 million
in punitive damages. In all, he gave them $1.178 billion, the largest
civil judgment decided against Cuba.
Many laughed it off as the latest bit of anti-Castro extremism.
Castro even dedicated his May 30 "Reflections of Fidel" column in
Granma to the Villoldoses' judgment. The award shows that "chaos
prevails" in America, he wrote, scoffing, "Such is justice in the
United States!" McLaren, the UCLA scholar, asks, "When are the
victims of U.S. imperialism going to get financial restitution? Who's
going to pay the families of everyone who committed suicide because
of the financial crisis?"
But Gustavo figures he can squeeze the cash out of Castro. Though the
frozen funds from 1959 are basically tapped out ("There's nothing
left," says Joe DeMaria, a Miami lawyer who has worked on these
cases), exiles have turned to American phone companies looking for
Cuban money. AT&T, Sprint and others sent more than $120 million to
Cuba through long-distance calls in the last half of 2008. Earlier
this month, a U.S. district judge ordered the companies to explain
the practice, setting the stage for a battle over the money.
Gustavo is watching the case, but has begun searching for Cuban
accounts and property in Western nations such as Spain that have long
had relations with Castro. He hopes to persuade those governments to
recognize his judgment and freeze Cuban assets. "It's a new strategy,
but it's got a good chance of working," says Jeremy W. Alters,
Gustavo's lead attorney.
Nicholas J. Gutierrez Jr., a Miami lawyer representing more than
5,000 exiles who lost property in the revolution, says it's a long
shot. "The truth is, many foreign governments are also owed large
sums of money by Cuba," he says. "I think he's going to find a lot
more debts than assets out there."
In his West Kendall home, Gustavo sits beneath an oil painting of his
father and glances around at his mementos. He has no regrets, he
says. Then his eyes flash.
"We are gonna collect," he says. "You don't know me, maybe. I'm
telling you: We are gonna collect."
.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
