American property claims in Cuba valued up to $8 billion,
When Amy Rosoff’s parents boarded a ferry from Cuba to Key West, Fla., in April 1961, they took only the clothes they could carry and a wedding band and diamond engagement ring, smuggled in a bundle of her brother’s cloth diapers that her mother had stained brown with vanilla to deter communist soldiers from searching them.
Left behind were the deep roots and rich life her American-born grandfather had begun building in Cuba more than a half-century before, along with everything else of value that belonged to the family: a 14,000-acre farm, a shirt factory that made guayaberas, and a stately 17-room Spanish colonial home in a section of Havana then known as “Country Club,” which belonged to Rosoff’s grandmother.
For Rosoff and the thousands of other American individuals and companies who hold financial claims against the Cuban government for property seized in the revolution — valued today at somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion — the resumption of diplomatic ties between Washington and Havana represents more than a historic thaw in relations between two Cold War-era adversaries.
It is a chance to be compensated for property long-since written off as irretrievable, and for some, an opportunity to heal old wounds still raw after decades.
“They lost this very well-established, vibrant life that just got splintered and shuttered off, and for all these years nothing could be done,” said Rosoff, who is now 50 and living with her mother in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “I look upon the opening up with Cuba as an opportunity that we haven’t had up until now to make this right, but I don’t want us to be trampled over.”
How claims by Rosoff’s family and thousands of others are resolved will be a test of the renewed ties between the United States and its neighbor 90 miles to the south, and may be an early indication of whether the historic opening President Barack Obama announced last December can make progress.
U.S. officials have said that resolving the claims is a priority, along with discussions on human rights and law enforcement issues, including a number of American fugitives being harbored by Cuba. But resolving them is a complicated and politically tangled process, made more difficult by the more than 50 years that have passed since Fidel Castro came to power and began confiscating land and businesses. In the years that followed, many filed claims with the U.S. government through the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an independent agency at the Department of Justice.