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8/25/2006 8:52:00 AM

Cuban Emigres Dust Off Claims on Old Properties

NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, Aug. 25, 2006

HAVANA -- Their glory is faded and marble stripped, but the mansions and
buildings of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution will one day
be the center of a thorny property rights dispute.

Emigres in Miami have been dusting off title deeds to properties,
sensing the end of Cuba's communist government is close after Castro
temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul Castro due to
intestinal surgery three weeks ago.

Many of the now dilapidated buildings are overflowing with families and
in dire need of repairs. Others were renovated by the state and rented
to foreign embassies and businesses.

In Havana, current tenants say former owners abandoned their properties
when they left Cuba in a hurry and have no rightful claims.

"This is mine. Nobody will take it away," said a woman who gave her name
as Paquita, a widow and member of the ruling Communist Party who lives
in a spacious American-style house with a pool in Havana's leafy Miramar
district.

She said the empty house was given to her husband, a revolutionary
leader, in 1960. She has lived there ever since and rents out rooms to
tourists for $100 a night.

The threat of an exiled bourgeoisie returning to Cuba to claim
confiscated property has helped shore up support for the Castro
government among Cubans who worry they could be kicked out of homes they
have occupied for decades.

Many exiles who have remade their lives in Miami are looking for
compensation after Castro has gone, rather than repossession.

"Lots of people think it will happen tomorrow. It won't. But this is the
beginning of the end of communism in Cuba," said Cuban-born Miami
resident Pablo Carreno as he looked through title deeds to five houses
his wife's family owned in Havana.

Carreno said inhabited houses would be harder to reclaim than a sugar
mill the family owned in central Cuba. "We are not going to send the
people back to the streets," he said.

Urbano Monasterio, a retired engineer who worked in Cuba's sugar
industry and now lives in the Miami area, built a 17-story apartment
building overlooking Havana's Malecon seafront in 1958 and lived in the
penthouse for two years before he left Cuba.

He said settling his claim could take years.

"People start thinking about going and getting property back, they can't
do that. Besides you have people living there who have to live
someplace. They don't have houses in Cuba. What are they going to do?
Kick them out? That's very bad," Monasterio said.

The duplex penthouse of the building is now the home of filmmaker Laura
Vitier, who has lived there since she was a baby. She cannot afford to
repair the sparsely furnished place. The pool is empty and the elevator
does not work.

"It cannot be legal to reclaim a property you abandoned 40 years ago
when you left the country because you did not agree with its
government," she said.

Two floors below, the diva of Cuba's famed Buena Vista Social Club
musical group, Omara Portuondo, lives in a three-bedroom apartment.

"I have lived here since 1970. I feel it is my own home," the
75-year-old singer said. "Who owns this view of the sea?"

U.S. citizens and companies lost $6 billion at today's prices in
confiscated property in Cuba and have 5,911 claims pending with the U.S.
government's Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. The nationalized
property of Cubans far exceeds that.

In Eastern Europe, property claims were settled in diverse ways after
communism collapsed. Some countries chose restitution, others
compensation and some recognized no claims.

Some Cuban emigres are determined to recover their family estates.

Clara Rodriguez Iznaga, a Miami-area doctor, said she inherited
documents giving her the rights to a 120,000-acre (48,560-hectare)
plantation near the colonial city of Trinidad, in central Cuba, which
boasted a large house and three or four sugar mills along with the homes
of 150 tenant farmers.

"This was an illegally seized property and it belongs to the family for
over 500 years, so why wouldn't I look into it?" she said. "It's more of
a romantic thing than a financial interest."

(c) 2006 Reuters.

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Cuban Emigres Dust Off Claims on Old Properties

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