Thousands of Cuba claims remain

Thousands of Cuba claims remain
9 HOURS AGO APRIL 27, 2015 11:08AM

THROUGHOUT the 1960s, the US government's Foreign Claims Settlement
Commission fielded thousands of American claims for confiscated Cuban
property. The largest came from corporations, led by US-owned Cuban
Electric Company, whose seized power plants were valued at $US268
million. After years of mergers, that claim is today held by retailer
Office Depot Inc.
BUT the majority of the 5,900 approved claims came from individuals and
families.
Luther Coleman was a Detroit entrepreneur who moved his family to the
Isle of Pines in 1952, where he bought more than 3,000 acres (1,214
hectares).
Coleman's daughter, Nancy Luetzow, who moved to Cuba when she was eight
and today lives in Hillsdale, Michigan, said her father convinced her
"timid" mother. "He said this is our chance to have a life in paradise."
The family's claim for lost property was valued by the FCSC at about
$US173,000.
Roy Schechter was born in Cuba, a dual American citizen whose family had
immigrated years earlier and founded Havana's synagogue. Schechter
married and brought his American wife, Lois, to the island.
In 1960, the couple drove to the family's 5,666-hectare farm to prepare
the week's payroll and was met by soldiers who told them they were no
longer the owners. When the couple departed soon after on a ferry to Key
West, Lois Schechter hid her wedding ring and other jewellery inside a
diaper stained with vanilla extract, hoping to dissuade Cuban officials
from a thorough search.
Before they left, they paid all their employees, expecting that one day
they'd return. Instead, Roy Schechter spent the rest of his working life
in the shoe store in Nyack, New York, owned by his father-in-law. The
Schechters' losses, along with the farm, included a 17-room Spanish
colonial in Havana that had been his mother's and now is used as a
residence for the Chinese embassy.
Their daughter, Amy Rosoff, who shares a home in Saratoga Springs, New
York, with her mother, recalls her father's regular reminders about
their claim.
"I'd love to get my grandmother's house back," Rosoff says, "because
it's a sort of a whole history that's been taken away".
Experts on the long-lost property differ on what to make of the American
claims, which are protected by international law.
"You're now dealing in the realm of memory more than anything else,"
says Robert Muse, a Washington lawyer representing companies with
claims. "For many, the sense of dispossession is to form an idealised
world that may not have altogether been exactly like that."
But Mauricio Tamargo, chairman of the settlement commission until 2010
and now a lawyer representing claimants, said the confiscations
inflicted lasting damage on American families.
"Many of them never recovered financially," Tamargo says. "You know,
nobody ever expected for their claims to go unpaid for 50 years."

Source: Thousands of Cuba claims remain -
http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/thousands-of-cuba-claims-remain/story-e6frfkur-1227322771868