Pure insanity.
Miami man awarded more than $1B in suit against Fidel Castro, Che Guevara
http://www.miamiherald.com/459/story/1072032.htmlIn what is considered the largest civil judgment against the Cuban government, a Miami-Dade judge on Friday awarded more than $1 billion to a Miami man who blamed Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolutionary sidekick Che Guevara for his father's suicide in 1959.
''What they did was torture this family and tear it apart,'' Miami-Dade Judge Peter Adrien said in siding with Gustavo Villoldo, a former CIA operative who had tracked down Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia.
Said Villoldo: ``You have brought closure to us after 50 years. Justice has prevailed.''
Jeremy Alters, Villoldo's attorney, said he and his client will now attempt to get the money from the frozen assets of the Cuban government. Those assets are in financial institutions throughout the world.
The funds may be almost impossible to obtain -- at least in the United States. Most of those assets identified by the Treasury Department in a Cuban bank account in New York were paid out in the Brothers to the Rescue case and in two other Miami cases.
Villoldo's suit against Castro and Guevara was rooted in the Cuban government's actions against a business owned by Gustavo Villoldo's father, also named Gustavo.
Back in 1959, Guevara was named head of Cuba's Banco Nacional and immediately began dismantling all traces of capitalism.
A main target: a General Motors distributorship owned by Villoldo's father. Guevara told Villoldo that his father's company would be seized. It left the family ruined financially.
Three weeks later, Villoldo's heartbroken father ended his life by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.
Villoldo later fled the island, headed for Miami and quickly joined Brigade 2506, taking part in the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion.
He became an officer in the U.S. Army by direct commission of President John F. Kennedy and later was recruited to work with the agency.
The Bolivian government later hired Villoldo to track down Guevara for the CIA.
The last major civil case brought against the Cuban government involved the family of Rafael del Pino Siero, who had broken with Castro over suspicions that he was a communist and was among the first Cubans to be jailed after the revolution.
Del Pino Siero was captured while trying to help a Cuban escape to Miami in July 1959. He died in his prison cell 18 years later at age 51, leaving behind in Miami two youngsters: Rafael del Pino Jr. and his sister, Milagros Suárez.
Miami-Dade County jurors in April 2008 gave the del Pino children almost $253 million, which was the biggest award to date in a wrongful death claim against the Cuban government.
That amount eclipsed the $187.6 million awarded by a federal judge to the relatives of three victims in the 1996 shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes by a Cuban MiG. Family members in that case collected about half the award from frozen Cuban assets in New York.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
