Reply #17: It looks as if they simply believe this government is going to completely control [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Cuba if they play their cards right, and it will simply hand over their old property, even if the mansions have been cut up into apartments for multiple families, and the plantations into small farm plots for individual farmers, etc.

Miami Cuban organizations have commissioned satellite photos of Cuba and have them spread all over the place making their plans to slice and dice the island as soon as they get back in power.

Here's a reference to this kind of busy-body activity they've whiled away their time with in Miami:

Exhibit, website show Havana in high-res

Satellite and street-level photos are combined to help imagine a Cuba of the future.

By Enrique Fernandez, [e-mail]. Posted on Fri, May. 25, 2007.

Havana Today in Images, a Miami Dade College photo exhibit that opens today at the Tower Theater in Little Havana, raises new though uncertain hopes among Cuban exiles for the reclamation of their property in a post-Castro Cuba.

The exhibit, which was organized by a Florida International University-based NASA office in collaboration with MDC, matches satellite images of specific zones of Havana with building-by-building, street-level photography.

A link on the project's website (http://no-more.com) clicks to an affidavit that can be filed, with supporting documentation, claiming ownership of the building photographed.

But whether the project will eventually help people reclaim property confiscated under Fidel Castro's regime is uncertain.

''Whether this is considered proper evidence depends on who would be processing these applications,'' says Tania Mastrapa, who runs a Miami consulting practice on property reclamation in Cuba (www.mastrapaconsultants.com).

''I have not heard of these claim mechanisms being used in other countries,'' says Mastrapa, whose doctoral thesis at the University of Miami examined post-Communist property claims in the Czech Republic and Nicaragua and the lessons they could have for Cuba.

Still, she says, "owners can see how their building is being used, if there's a sign for a restaurant, for example, or what shape it's in. Then they can decide if they want to try to reclaim it.

''A lot of people outside Cuba don't even know if their property still exists because of hurricanes, deterioration of buildings and lack of maintenance,'' Mastrapa says.

The project's creator and director, Naphtali David Rishe, says it has ''no political message.'' Rishe heads FIU's High Performance Database Research Center and NASA Regional Applications Center, also at FIU.

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y07/may07/29e1.htm

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Just did a quick search and found a quick reference to the compensation offered by Cuba in this LTTE:

I was pleasantly surprised to see such an enlightening article on the situation in Cuba in a U.S. publication. Your readers might appreciate knowing that the U.S. political situation with respect to Cuba is, if anything, even more bizarre than Joy Gordon points out, and seems to revolve around North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms (a co-sponsor of the Helms-Burton bill, which is a clear imposition of U.S. law extraterritorially for reasons of nothing more than extremist right-wing ideology).

Defenders of the bill frequently accuse Canada and Mexico in particular of "trafficking in stolen U.S. property" (a direct quote from Marc Thiessen, an aide to Senator Helms, on the CBC Radio program As it Happens). What they fail to point out is that the Castro government offered compensation for all appropriated property after the revolution, but the U.S. government quickly passed a law forbidding U.S. companies to accept any such compensation. Two Canadian members of Parliament who claim to be descended from Loyalists from North Carolina have introduced, tongue in cheek, a bill that would keep Senator Helms and his immediate family from traveling to Canada until North Carolina settles its outstanding claims with the estates of Loyalists who left after the American Revolution. (Thiessen claims that Britain settled these debts, which is true, but it was only after North Carolina defaulted.)

Marc A. Schindler
Spruce Grove, Alberta

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97apr/9704lett.htm