Cuba claims just tell stories now

Cuba claims just tell stories now
APRIL 27, 2015 11:18AM

INSIDE the offices of a little-known US federal agency, more than 5,900
claims files tally the furniture and factories, clothing and cars that
once belonged to Americans in Cuba.
BUT really, the claims are stories - of lives that were left behind.
Edmund Chester's story began soon after he came home to Louisville,
Kentucky, from the Army and got a job as a newspaper reporter. In his
off hours, Chester taught himself Spanish, which lead him away again. In
1929, he was hired by The Associated Press, which dispatched him to Havana.
Chester spent the next decade reporting across the Caribbean and Latin
America. His work kindled a love of Cuba, whose music and art filled his
home until his death, and seeded two crucial relationships.
The first came when he covered a 1933 revolt that put a former sergeant,
Fulgencio Batista, in charge of Cuba's military. Two decades later, when
Batista was Cuba's dictator, he trusted Chester - by then a fishing
companion and confidant, no longer a journalist - to write his
authorised biography, with a photo of the men smiling alongside one
another, inside the front cover.
The second relationship began in 1939 when Chester went to Chile to
cover an earthquake and spotted Enna, nearly 20 years his junior, at a
hotel swimming pool. Years later, their daughter recalls, the couple
would dance around the parlour of their Florida home to the ballad
Besame Mucho - Spanish for "kiss me a lot".
"He was still smitten with her," Carolyn Chester says.
In 1940, CBS hired Chester as its chief of radio broadcasting for Latin
America. Eventually, he became the network's director of news and
special events, working in New York alongside Edward R Murrow.
Chester returned to Cuba in 1952, buying a chain of radio stations on an
island where US companies dominated the economy. Havana was a magnet for
Americans, including celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando,
searching for a hedonistic getaway.
"Cuba was a cabaret, a casino, a place to soak up the sun," says Louis
Perez, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "Boy, did that
change."
Chester sold the radio stations after a few years. But his growing
family continued to split their time between an apartment overlooking
Havana Bay and central Florida.
He opened a Havana public relations agency and when a Hollywood crew
came to make a 1956 feature, The Sharkfighters, Chester shepherded them
around what was then called the Isle of Pines, off Cuba's south coast.
Soon after, the Chesters bought an 32-hectare farm on the island, once
home to an American population large enough to support its own school.
In 1957, the Chesters acquired $US250,000 worth of shares in the Cuban
Telephone Co.
But Edmund Chester, an adviser and speechwriter for Batista, grew uneasy
as Castro's rebels gained ground.
"Preciosa, I have just hung up the telephone after talking to you and I
could tell that you were worried," he wrote his wife from Havana in July
1958, weeks after Carolyn was born.
"I agree that we ought to make (a) complete break with Cuba at the
earliest possible moment."
When he rejoined the family in Florida three days before Christmas, his
work in Cuba was still unfinished. But days later, Batista fled the
country, and on January 1, 1959, Castro's forces seized control.
In the first months of Castro's rule, many American officials thought he
was someone they could work with.
But when the Soviet Union began shipping oil to Cuba, the US ordered
island refineries - owned by American firms and other multinationals -
not to process the crude from its Cold War archrival.
The Cuban government seized the refineries. The Eisenhower
administration struck back by eliminating price protection for Cuban
sugar, which netted the island 90 per cent of its hard currency
earnings. Cuba had already nationalised the island's largest farms and
moved to take control of still others. By the time President John F.
Kennedy imposed the embargo in 1962, Cuba had confiscated scores of
properties.
Marooned, Edmund Chester, looked for a way to support the family. He
hadn't foreseen this forced retirement, he wrote a friend in 1965. And
now most of his nest egg had been "whipped into a batch of Cuban
scrambled eggs by the tyranny of Fidel Castro".

Source: Cuba claims just tell stories now -
http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/cuba-claims-just-tell-stories-now/story-e6frfkur-1227322822152