In the interest of full disclosure, our family lost a home that was under construction.  The house was never built, but we had chosen the location.  I still remember my uncle, an architect, talking to my mother about the location of the windows.  He was advising her to take advantage of the breeze that always flowed in Cuba.

My parents have no interest in claiming the ground.  They were just happy that the three of us got to grow up in freedom.

Many of my friends did lose their properties and got no compensation for them.

I know a Cuban woman whose family ranch was confiscated by soldiers who showed up and threw the family from the grounds at gunpoint.  Sadly, the ranch had been in the family for a century and raised cattle for domestic beef consumption.  My guess is that the cows are dead and the place is another unproductive piece of Cuban land.

It gives me pleasure, and a sense of justice, that some people are going to court to challenge the communist regime.  I've talked to some of them, and they're all doing it for their parents, who worked so hard to build those businesses.  It's like justice for "mami y papi," and I understand that fully.

This is from Fergus Hodgson:

Nearly 60 years have passed since the confiscations began, but the damages are easily identifiable for tens of thousands of Cuban exiles and their descendants. 

The Castro regime also carried out the mass theft in a brazenly public manner, so there is no dispute over its occurrence and the amount of property affected.

In the short run, the confiscation was done to exploit the nonsense that all of the property-owners were part of the CIA.  In the long run, it was another communist failure because the factories and ranches had no one to run them.

So let justice happen.  I don't personally care for any money from the communists.  I just want them to recognize the injustice of stealing property and accusing our parents of something they were not.

As my late father once said, "we create jobs and made Cuba prosperous.  What did the communists do?"  They didn't create real jobs or make the island prosperous.

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Image: Marcelo Montecino via Flickr.