Ownership in Cuba Becomes Hot Issue

Ownership in Cuba Becomes Hot Issue
With democratization possible, exiles wonder whether they'd get back the
land seized decades ago -- and how, if it all, they'd be compensated.
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2006

MIAMI — In the 1950s, when Alberto Beguiristain's family owned 130,000
acres of farmland, two sugar mills and a distillery in Cuba, their 5,000
employees earned an average of $6 a day.

Now, at the dilapidated mill in Quemado de Guines that is the sole
Beguiristain enterprise still functioning, it takes the average laborer
almost a month to earn $6.

ADVERTISEMENTBeguiristain, who now lives in Miami, says he thinks his
former countrymen would welcome his return to run what's left of the
family business if the ailing Fidel Castro dies and Cubans turn toward a
democratic government and pro-market economy.

"My cousin went back to our hometown a few years ago," the 74-year-old
insurance agent recalled. Outside the mill gates, the travelers
encountered some elderly peasants. "They told her, 'We need your people.
When are you coming back?' "

The question of who will own what in a post-Castro Cuba has been an
intoxicating subject here since the July 31 news of the president's
surgery and temporary transfer of power to his brother Raul.

But few are as optimistic as Beguiristain that the question could be
resolved cleanly and simply.

Beguiristain is one of more than 150,000 Cubans who initially fled the
1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro's guerrillas to power. Each
family stripped of its property for alleged collaboration with the
deposed regime of Fulgencio Batista was usually allowed to take only $5
and the clothes they were wearing.

Many of the exiles have kept tabs on their properties through friends
who visit the island, or, like Beguiristain, from the Google Earth
program that allows them to see satellite images on the Internet. There
they get a glimpse of the time, money and energy needed for restoration.

It has been nearly half a century since Castro's revolutionaries took
control of the Cuban economy. Factories were put under state management,
farmland handed to cooperatives, and elegant houses carved up into small
apartments and doled out to the poor.

The Communist government settled claims early on with most foreign
investors, though not with U.S. owners. There are about 6,000 claims
valued at nearly $8 billion registered with the U.S. Foreign Claims
Settlement Commission.

But the vast majority of property seized in the name of Castro's
revolution was from Cuban owners, large and small. Though original
owners are dying, some survive on dreams of recovering family homes,
replanting gardens or rebuilding businesses opened by their ancestors.

Cuban American lawyer Nicolas Gutierrez, whose family was one of the
wealthiest in Cuba before the revolution, estimates that at least $100
billion in property was taken from Cuban owners.

Although there is no formal registry of Cuban claims, Gutierrez
estimates that at least 2 million people on the island or in exile may
have the right, as original owners or their heirs, to claim seized
assets or compensation if Cuba is democratized.

"Restitution is not only a pro-exile policy, it's a pro-Cuban policy.
Most former property owners are still on the island," said Gutierrez,
who was born in Miami to exile parents. "We want everyone to get what
they lost."

Cuba has the advantage of learning from the mistakes and successes of
new democracies in Eastern Europe, said Tania C. Mastrapa, a Miami
consultant on foreign property claims who did her doctoral dissertation
on ownership resolution in those post-Communist countries.

How quickly any restitution or compensation program could be enacted in
Cuba depends on when and what kind of change occurs, Mastrapa said.

Flocks of former owners have descended on Mastrapa's practice in recent
weeks, newly encouraged that political change is coming in Cuba because
of the illness and incapacitation of 80-year-old Castro.

"I try to get my clients to hope for the best but to expect the worst,"
she said.

Even if transition is swift and thorough, a Communist-controlled
judiciary will probably still be in power during the crucial early days
— and therefore in charge of administering privatization and setting
terms for resolving multiple claims and ethical conflicts.

In Eastern Europe, private ownership has been restored with an array of
privatization, restitution and compensation programs.

In Latvia, residential property that had been seized from owners after
the 1940 Soviet takeover was occupied — sometimes for decades — by other
families.

The new Latvian government crafted a seven-year property ownership
transition period after the country broke from the Soviet Union in 1991,
leaving original owners and occupants to negotiate rents or buyouts and
providing arbitration for the few irreconcilable cases.

Mastrapa conducted an informal survey of Cuban exiles with property
claims. She said she was surprised to learn that most would be willing
to accept some other form of compensation if their property was
irreparable or being used for a socially redeeming purpose. Only 23%
insisted on restitution.

Over the years, Cuba's government has equated any steps toward
capitalism with an invasion of property-grabbing exiles. Some exiles
with more recent experience of life on the island warn that the property
issue is hypersensitive and that owners should come to terms with their
losses.

"It's a page in ancient history, and it would be sheer madness from the
political standpoint to be making claims," said Domingo Amuchastegui, a
former Cuban intelligence official who defected in 1994.

Restoring private property and settling outstanding claims are among the
transitional issues addressed in the 2004 report by the U.S. Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which lays out over nearly 450 pages
Washington's priorities for rebuilding democratic and free-market
institutions in Cuba.

Amuchastegui criticized the Bush administration report as presumptuously
advising Cubans on what reforms they should undertake, and he warned
that it fed into the Castro regime's propaganda meant to frighten Cubans
about change.

"The U.S. government, if requested by a transition Cuban government,
could help establish a structure for addressing property
expropriations," the report says, detailing a legal and judicial process
for Cubans to follow.

Cuban American social leaders agree the issue is delicate and divisive.

"Cuban exiles are not going to go back and boot people out of their
homes," said Alfredo Mesa, executive director of the Cuban American
National Foundation.

Attorney Gaston Cantens represents the Fanjul family, which lost sugar
mills, farmland and homes in Cuba but rebuilt in Palm Beach County into
Florida Crystals, the state's largest sugar producer. Cantens says that
recovering property is "in the back of everyone's mind," but that most
exiles are more focused on seeing democracy brought to their native land.

Recalling the Eastern European success in restoring property, Cantens
added: "I can't imagine in Cuba there is not going to be a similar
process. But I don't think you're going to have people knocking on doors
saying, 'This is my home, you've got to leave.' "

Still, it remains uncertain whether, when and what kind of change is
ahead for Cuba — a Western-style democracy, the Chinese model or some
hybrid.

Though most former owners are in their 70s or older, they refuse to
concede that they are unlikely to live to see their properties returned
to them.

That hope dies last is evident in the long-nurtured dreams of exiles
like Beguiristain to once again see the land of their birth and the
backdrop of their youth.

Beguiristain, who moves slowly and with a cane after knee surgery this
year, said that he would never displace Cubans from the residential
properties his family lost but that he would eagerly return to a free
Cuba to try to breathe life into his family's dying businesses.

"I hope that it is in my lifetime," he said with a dejected glance at
his swollen leg. "I think once it gets going, it's going to be almost
immediately. Once they get an elected government, they'll need to
reconstruct everything."

He's ready to leave his spacious home and the comforts he built for
himself and his family to be part of that reconstruction, he said,
noting that his son's power boat is gassed up and ready to depart for
Havana at the first sign from either government that U.S. investment is
welcome on the island.

carol.williams@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cubans10sep10,1,1877835.story?ctrack=1&cset=true