By David Schoetz, Globe Correspondent

Ronald Locke Crosbie, who was forced by Fidel Castro's revolution from his native Cuba and who traveled the world with his wife and four daughters as an executive for First National Bank of Boston, died Wednesday of heart failure at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was 76.

The son of a Scotsman who managed the Guantanamo Sugar Co., Mr. Crosbie was educated in Connecticut, where he attended Suffield Academy and Yale University. After his 1949 graduation, he returned to Cuba, accepting a position at First National Bank in Havana.

"He loved the Cuban people, the weather, and the music," said his eldest daughter, Catherine Lentz, of Cambridge. "He loved the Cuban way of life."

He met his wife, Ethlyn Ann (Dohm), an employee at the US Embassy in Havana, in 1955, marrying her the next year. They moved to a house in Santiago, Cuba, that overlooked the Sierra Maestre. There, Castro and his rebel troops were preparing for the Cuban revolution that ousted the regime of Fulgencio Batista.

According to a September 1996 Boston Globe story about the Boston bank in Cuba, "Bank of Boston officers were part of a world in which the dollar and the peso were interchangeable. Miami was a 45-minute flight away, and Frank Sinatra would drop in for the night. Life was so good it seemed it would never end."

But violence escalated and, after Castro seized power on New Year's Day in 1959, many of Mr. Crosbie's employees in the Santiago branch bucked the company's tie policy and began wearing fatigues.

"We had to tell them they couldn't take their sidearms into the building," Mr. Crosbie said in the story. Mr. Crosbie was frequently interrogated at barricades on his commute. "I can't tell you how many cadavers I saw along the road," he told the Globe.

He also was a passenger on a plane hijacked by Batista supporters in 1959.

In 1961, with Castro nationalizing all the country's private companies, Mr. Crosbie fled with his family for Brazil.

"He was very reticent about speaking about the revolution," said Caroline Benavente of Newton, the second of his four daughters, "mainly because it caused him to have to leave his home."

After two years in Brazil, the Crosbie family moved to Argentina, where they lived for nine years, until 1972. Mr. Crosbie traveled throughout Latin and South America, his girls in tow, overseeing the opening of bank branches in smaller cities in Peru, Paraguay, and Bolivia.

"It was important for him to expose us to other countries and cultures," said his daughter Catherine. "Now I see how stressful it must have been."

Inspired by the variety of birds in Argentina, Mr. Crosbie built a 600-square-foot aviary onto the family's sun porch. He housed a range of exotic species, including Java sparrows and zebra finches.

After working stints in London and Miami, Mr. Crosbie settled in in 1980 in Sherborn, where he worked as an executive in the Boston office of First National Bank until his 1987 retirement.

The amateur ornithologist continued pursuing his hobby in New England, constructing birdhouses across the family's 2 1/2 acres and waging war with squirrels and racoons eager to tamper with his feeders.

He also tended to substantial gardens that included a small orchard of Astrican apple trees, a variety of tomatoes, and extensive flower beds.

"He wished to return to Cuba but felt that Castro and many of his policies really destroyed the country as he knew it," said his daughter Caroline. "Like many people, he always thought it was temporary and he would one day return."

In addition to his wife and two daughters, Mr. Crosbie leaves two other daughters, Marilyn Basile and Allison Crosbie, both of Cambridge; and four grandchildren.

A private funeral service was held yesterday.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.