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The Guardian
04-05-2025
- The Guardian
US jury's $30m verdict brings hope for Cuban exiles over confiscated land
Long before it became one of Cuba's most popular tourist destinations in the 1990s, the small island of Cayo Coco, with its pristine beaches and powdery white sands, attracted a different kind of clientele. Inspired by its unspoiled beauty, and his observations of shack-dwelling fishermen scratching out a meager living, Ernest Hemingway set scenes from two of his most famous books there, including the 1952 classic The Old Man and the Sea. Then came the giant all-inclusive mega-resort hotels that have proliferated in recent decades along the island's northern coast, and brought in millions of desperately needed dollars for a largely destitute Cuban government. Now, there's a bitterly contested multimillion-dollar lawsuit that has implications for the descendants of dozens of Cuban exiles in the US who have been fighting for decades for compensation for land and property seized following Fidel Castro's 1959 communist revolution. Mario Echeverría, head of a Cuban American family in Miami that says it owned Cayo Coco, and saw it stolen from them in Castro's aggressive land reforms, won a $30m verdict this month from the travel giant Expedia after a two-week trial. The jury said Expedia, and subsidiaries Orbitz and illegally profited from promoting and selling vacation packages at hotels there. The rare lawsuit was one of the first brought under Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, also known as the Helms-Burton Act. The act was designed to finally open a legal pathway for such compensation claims, but was suspended by successive presidents until Donald Trump made the decision to activate it in 2019. The intention was to deter US and international companies from investing in Cuba by exposing them to potentially huge financial penalties for conducting business there. For Echeverría, who reminisced about his grandmother tending the beachfront at Cayo Coco in a moving Spanish-language interview with UniVista TV earlier this year, the verdict is not the end of the story. He and his family may never see a penny after Federico Moreno, the district court judge overseeing the case, paused the award and set a further hearing for August seeking 'specific evidence' that the family itself legally acquired the land on Cuba's independence from Spain in 1898. The only other previously adjudicated Helms-Burton penalty, a $439m illegal tourism ruling in 2022 against four major cruise lines operating from Havana, was overturned last year. An appeals court said a claim by descendants of the original dock owners was essentially out of time. A handful of other cases, meanwhile, have stalled – including one by the oil giant Exxon Mobil that claims various Cuban state corporations are profiting from its confiscated land. But those at the forefront of the fight for justice say the Expedia case in particular brings hope to scores of others pursuing compensation for property they insist was illegally seized. 'There are 45 other suits that are making their way through the courts, there may be more new ones after this verdict also,' said Nicolás Gutiérrez, president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba. Gutiérrez is a Miami-based consultant who has worked with hundreds of dispossessed exiles and their families, in addition to pursuing amends for his own family's lost houses, farmland and mills. 'We are hopeful that this is just the beginning. We waited 23 years, from 1996 to 2019, to have the key provisions of Title III be put into effect by President Trump, and now there's new generations of families in these cases I'm working with,' he said, adding: 'The old guys back then are gone, but in many cases their kids have continued with their crusade. Some have given up, some have been sort of reactivated along the way, and it's not only justice for the families, it's like a historic and moral commitment. We sacrificed and built up prosperity in Cuba that was taken for no good reason.' Gutiérrez also believes that desperate conditions on the island could hasten the fight. 'They never recovered from the pandemic with tourism. The sugar, nickel and rum industries, and tobacco to a lesser extent, have been run into the ground. Remittances and trips are going to be further cut by the Trump administration, and that's really what they're relying on now,' he said. 'They don't even have electricity for more than a couple hours a day. 'Someday, relatively soon, there will be a big change, and if a future Cuba wants to attract the serious level of investment it will need to dig itself out of the hole that this totalitarian nightmare has dug over the last 66 years, what better way to inspire confidence than to recognize the victims of the illegal confiscations?' Analysts of Cuban politics say the government is taking notice of the Helms-Burton actions. These analysts are also looking into the ramifications of Trump's existing and planned crackdowns designed to increase financial pressure on the communist regime. 'There are people looking at the impact it's having overall in the investment scenario in the island, and apparently it's having some chilling effect,' said Sebastian Arcos, director of Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute. 'The most important chilling effect is the fact that the Cuban economy is going nowhere, and everybody knows it. 'The government stole properties from many thousands of Cubans, and what we're seeing now is a systematic attempt of many of the people who inherited these claims from their families not to try to recover, because it's impossible to recover anything as long as the Cuban regime is there, but at least to punish the regime financially for doing what they did.' It's unclear if Echeverría's family will become the first to actually receive compensation, but with stretches of Cayo Coco's northern coastline now consumed by the concrete of almost a dozen super-resorts offering more than 5,000 hotel rooms, they accept the land will not be returned. Their attorney, Andrés Rivero, said in a statement: 'This is a major victory not only for our client, but also for the broader community of Cuban Americans whose property was wrongfully taken and has been exploited by US companies in partnership with the Cuban communist dictatorship. 'We are proud to have played a role in securing justice under a law that had never before been tested before a jury.' Expedia did not reply to specific questions. A spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian: 'We are disappointed in the jury's verdict, which we do not believe was supported by the law or evidence. We believe the court was correct to decline immediate entry of judgment and look forward to the court's consideration of the legal sufficiency of the evidence presented to the jury.'
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Yahoo
On This Day, May 4: Love Bug virus crashes computers across globe
May 4 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1494, on his second expedition to the New World, Columbus explored the Caribbean island of Jamaica. In 1886, four police officers were killed when a bomb was thrown during a meeting of anarchists in Chicago's Haymarket Square protesting labor unrest. Four leaders of the demonstration, which became known as the Haymarket Square Riot, were convicted and hanged. In 1904, construction began on the Panama Canal. Panama celebrated the 100th anniversary of the canal's completion in 2014. In 1926, the Trade Union Congress called a general strike in response to government plans to change the working conditions for coal miners. More than 2 million workers across Britain went on strike. In 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea began. It was a turning point for the Allies in World War II. In 1945, French author Marcel Conversy wrote of the 15 months he spent as a prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp, describing it as a "living hell." In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1959, the first Grammy Awards were presented. "Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu (Volare)" by Domenico Modugno won the awards for Record and Song of the Year. In 1970, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The shootings set off a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of schools to temporarily close. In 1982, an Argentine jet fighter sank the British destroyer HMS Sheffield during the Falkland Islands war. In 1990, a faulty electric chair shot flames around convicted killer Jesse Tafero's head as he was executed in Florida, prompting several states to abandon the method of execution and switch to lethal injection. In 2000, the ILOVEYOU or Love Bug virus crashed computers around the world. In 2002, more than 100 people died when an EAS Airlines jet crashed in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. In 2006, confessed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The 37-year-old Moroccan implicated himself in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. In 2011, rival Palestinian political factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation accord, citing as common causes opposition to the Israeli occupation and disillusionment with U.S. peace efforts. In 2020, the U.S. Coast Guard named Rear Adm. Melissa Bert as its first female judge advocate and chief counsel, its top legal position. In 2024, pop legend Madonna set a record for having the largest concert audience -- 1.6 million people -- by a solo artist in history. She performed for free before the crowd in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to close out her Celebration world tour.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
David Szalay: ‘In a sense, all fiction is fan fiction'
My earliest reading memoryThe first novel I remember reading was called My Side of the Mountain. I'm not sure how old I was. Maybe nine. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I had to look the book up to make sure that it actually exists, that I didn't just dream it. It does exist, and it's easy to understand why I liked it so much. It presents a vision of idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously spoke to something in me at the time. The book that made me want to be a writerIt's hard to answer this question because it implies some kind of single 'road to Damascus' moment that didn't happen. Having said that, I remember even today the impact that two short, simple novels had on me when I read them at the age of 11 or 12. They were George Orwell's Animal Farm and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and it's probably at about that time that I started 'wanting to be a writer'. I think that the desire to be a writer is essentially the desire to imitate, to recreate the effect that other people's writing has had on you. In that sense all fiction is fan fiction. The book that changed me as a teenagerThe power of books to change people is probably overstated, but certainly my view of what literature was, of what it meant to write something, of the relationship between the written word and the world it strives to represent, was shaped, when I was 15 or 16 I suppose, by my reading Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. Part social and cultural history, part group portrait, part criticism, part memoir, straying often to the edges of philosophy, shot through with a kind of sadness, it left a profound impression on my adolescent self. The book or author I came back toAll fired up about modernist literature, I turned, naturally enough, to James Joyce's Ulysses. I was encouraged in this by a sympathetic English teacher. I think I read it over the holidays and when school resumed we talked about it. 'Did you find it funny?' he asked me. I found the question odd. The fact is, I had completely failed to realise that the book is a comedy. I imagine myself, at the age of 16 or whatever, solemnly reading, say, the passage at the end of the 'Sirens' episode in which the music is the sound of Bloom's flatulence – Pprrpffrrppff – and totally failing to see the joke. Since then I have reread it, more in the spirit, I hope, in which it was written. The book I discovered later in lifeI read As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner for the first time a year or two ago. The device of having chapters offering different points of view on some situation, each one labelled with the name of the character whose perspective we are about to get, has become wearily familiar. In what might be its original iteration, though, it feels fresh and powerful. Particularly when combined with the way Faulkner ventriloquises the rough language of his characters, while giving them a sort of Homeric grandeur in their closeness to the essential experiences of human life. That the novel is about a demographic that has come to seem politically salient in the US (and elsewhere) just adds another dimension of interest to it. Having waited nearly 50 years to discover it, I've no doubt I'll be reading it again soon. The book I rereadOne I have been returning to again and again since I was in my 20s is Samuel Pepys' Diary. It must be the most moreish book I know. Picking it up to read a single short entry, I can easily get stuck in it for an hour. As fascinating as the differences between our world and the world of the 1660s are the similarities – it's easy to imagine Pepys having a substantively identical life in modern London. And the man himself? He's just very human: generous, deceitful, vain, loving, petty, lustful, intelligent, and never anything other than massively engaging in the perfect frankness he brings to his endeavour. The book I am currently readingI've just read Tessa Hadley's wonderful novella The Party. More than full-length novels, novellas are capable of approaching perfection – think of Death in Venice, or Kafka's Metamorphosis – and The Party (although very different from either of those works!) has that life-enhancing sense of being flawless, unimprovable. I know it will be one of those books that I remember in detail years after reading it. My comfort readNot fiction at all. Fiction is too close to life, perhaps, to be that comforting. For comfort I read poetry – Virgil, Wang Wei, Auden – and medieval history, something like Iris Origo's Merchant of Prato. Flesh by David Szalay is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Casey, Novelist of Salty, Rough-Hewn Characters, Dies at 86
John Casey, a writer of lyric yet taut prose in novels, essays and short stories who won the National Book Award in 1989 for 'Spartina,' the story of a rough-hewn fisherman that reviewers called the best American story of nautical life since Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' died on Feb. 22 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86. His daughters Clare and Julie Casey said the cause was complications of dementia. Mr. Casey, who spent most of his literary career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, was best known for his pinpoint renderings of blue-collar characters, like Dick Pierce, the Rhode Island boatman at the center of 'Spartina,' whom the author referred to as a 'swamp Yankee.' The novel revolves around both Pierce's romantic entanglements — long married, he starts an affair and gets his lover pregnant — and his struggles to build a boat. Spartina, a sea grass, becomes the unifying metaphor of the book. 'Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water,' Mr. Casey wrote. 'Smart grass. If he ever got his big boat built he might just call her Spartina, though he ought to call her after his wife.' Mr. Casey won a National Book Award in 1989 for his novel 'Spartina' about a married fisherman and his romantic entanglements. Credit... Alfred A. Knopf, New York The novelist Susan Kenney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called the novel 'splendidly conceived, flawlessly rendered and totally absorbing.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
