OMAHA — The smell of Cuban coffee drifts from the kitchen as Carolyn Chester digs through photos that fill boxes spread across the dining table.
Friends linked arm in arm on a Cuban beach.
Men in suits and women in evening gowns at a Havana nightclub.
In almost every frame, an American man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a raven-haired woman — Chester’s parents — are smiling at good fortune that, clearly unknown to them, would soon be snatched away.
“I always heard about Cuba … and all this money that we lost and ‘Maybe one day,’ but I didn’t understand it,” Chester says.
Six decades later, that day might finally be nearing for Chester and others like her. To reach it, though, diplomacy will have to settle very old scores.
After Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, Cuba confiscated property belonging to thousands of American citizens and companies. Edmund and Enna Chester lost an 80-acre farm, thousands of dollars’ worth of stock and a Buick that, who knows, might still be plying Havana’s streets.
In 1996, Congress passed a law insisting Cuba pay for confiscated property, valued today at $7 billion, before lifting the U.S. embargo.
That went unmentioned in President Barack Obama’s announcement in December that the countries would resume diplomatic ties. Given Cuba’s frail economy, experts say companies whose property was taken might settle for rights to do business there and move on.
But corporations don’t cling to memories like families can. That’s clear inside Chester’s 832-square-foot bungalow, where her mother’s gold-framed portrait watches over the yellowing property deed and worthless stock certificates.
The federal Foreign Claims Settlement Commission has fielded thousands of claims for confiscated Cuban property. The largest came from corporations, led by U.S.-owned Cuban Electric Co., for power plants valued at $268 million. Most came from individuals and families.
Experts differ on what to make of the American claims, protected by international law.
“You’re now dealing in the realm of memory more than anything else,” says Robert Muse, an attorney representing companies with claims.
But Mauricio Tamargo, commission chairman until 2010 and now a Washington lawyer representing claimants, said confiscations inflicted lasting damage on families. “Many of them never recovered financially,” Tamargo says.
Edmund Chester’s story began when he returned to Louisville, Ky., from the Army and found work as a newspaper reporter. He taught himself Spanish, and in 1929 he was hired by The Associated Press, which dispatched him to Havana.
Chester spent a decade reporting from the Caribbean and Latin America, time that seeded two crucial relationships.
The first came after covering a 1933 revolt that put a former sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, in charge of Cuba’s military. In the 1950s, when Batista was Cuba’s dictator, he trusted Chester — by then a confidant and no longer a journalist — to write his biography.
The second began when Chester covered a 1939 earthquake in Chile and spotted Enna at a hotel swimming pool.
In 1940, CBS hired Chester as chief of radio broadcasting for Latin America. Eventually, he became the network’s director of news in New York.
He opened a public-relations agency in Cuba and bought an 80-acre farm there. In 1957, the Chesters acquired $250,000 worth of Cuban Telephone Co shares. But Edmund Chester, then Batista’s speechwriter, grew uneasy as Castro gained ground.
He rejoined the family in Florida before Christmas. Batista fled days later, and Castro seized control. Marooned, Edmund Chester wrote that his nest egg had been “whipped into a batch of Cuban scrambled eggs by the tyranny of Fidel Castro.”
5,900
American claims for confiscated property that were certified by the federal Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. Though originally valued at nearly $1.9 billion, adjustments for inflation mean they are worth $7 billion or more today.
$268 million
One of the largest claims, by American-owned Cuban Electric Co. for lost power plants, a claim now held by retailer Office Depot Inc. as a result of mergers
8 in 10
Number of claims for lost property valued at $10,000 or less by the FCSC.
70 percent
Claims that were for stock. Many also involved land or other real estate, with most of that either in Havana or on the former Isle of Pines.
