Cuban exiles have renewed hope and fears over claims on property seized long ago
Deeply ingrained in Raul Valdes-Fauli’s family lore is the November 1960 day when an agent of Fidel Castro’s revolution showed up at his family’s Pedroso Bank in Havana, with a machine gun, and demanded they leave.
Calling his father and uncle gusanos - or worms, a Spanish-language term coined by Castro to denigrate those fleeing the island — the agent seized the bank and, in an instant, dispossessed a family that arrived from Spain in the 16th century.
“They told them this was now the people’s bank,” said Valdes-Fauli, an attorney and former mayor of the Miami suburb of Coral Gables.
“They couldn’t even take family pictures off the walls of their office.”
Seven decades later such traumatic episodes are resurfacing with urgency, as President Donald Trump’s threats of military intervention, backed by a naval blockade of fuel shipments that has brought the island’s already-anemic economy to its knees, have spawned negotiations between Washington and Havana.
Many Cuban Americans are convinced that 2026 could - finally - be the year of regime change on the communist-run island. But that cautious optimism among exiles is tempered by concern they could be cut out.
Their nightmare scenario: a repeat of what happened recently in Venezuela, where Trump ousted Nicolas Maduro only to join forces with his former allies in a partnership where demands for democracy are taking a back seat to oil industry dealmaking.
“I hope that he doesn’t do what he did in Venezuela, which is keep the thieves in power,” said Valdes-Fauli, who married a Venezuelan.
An emotional element of the talks, and one of the toughest to resolve, is the potential for hundreds of thousands of legal claims by Cuban Americans whose homes, businesses and land were seized after Castro took power in 1959.
Nick Gutierrez’s home is full of fading land titles, black-and-white photographs and obscure books including one torn-apart tome — “The Owners of Cuba, 1958” - that describes the 550 biggest fortunes taken over by the revolution.
As president of the National Association of Cuban Landowners in Exile, Gutierrez advises Cuban exile families on how to seek compensation for the forced collectivism.
For decades that was a lonely mission relegated to the legal fringes, because there was never any hope of getting Cuba to pay. “A lot of it just fell on deaf ears,” Gutierrez said.
But with rising speculation about possible regime change, real interest in the issue has exploded among those who previously saw costly litigation as a fool’s errand, as well as younger Cuban American entrepreneurs eager to help rebuild a country they barely know but whose heritage they proudly carry.
“Now we’re talking about the existential issue of whether the Cuban dictatorship will survive until next month,” said Gutierrez, whose parents fled the island two years before he was born.
Untangling property claims in Cuba is akin to battling a multiheaded hydra, said Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in US laws relating to Cuba.
In the hierarchy of property losses, those with the strongest standing under US law are the 5,913 claims certified by the Justice Department in 1972 for $1.9 billion.
They include corporations like ExxonMobil and Marriott International whose assets were seized as part of Castro’s nationalisation drive of everything from oil refineries and the telephone system to hair salons and shoeshine stands.
