Associated Press

MIAMI -- The widow and four children of an American businessman executed by a Cuban firing squad at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion asked a judge
Wednesday for almost $600 million in damages from Cuba for his death.

The family of Howard Anderson filed a lawsuit two years ago against Cuba based on a 1996 act that lets Americans sue foreign countries or individuals responsible
for terrorism.

Cuban President Fidel Castro and his government are ignoring the suit, as they have done in similar cases, and aren't represented in the Miami courtroom.

The family won a default judgment in February, and the damages trial ended Wednesday. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ellen Leesfield's ruling was not expected for
several weeks.

Anderson, 41, had lived and worked in Cuba for years when he was charged with conspiracy during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. He was sentenced to
death April 18 that year.

An appeal was quickly rejected, and he and eight others defendants were shot at dawn the next day.

Leesfield said Anderson's family deserves damages because he was not given a proper trial.

"His execution was tantamount to a killing outside the realm of any civilized law," she said.

Scott Leeds, one of the Anderson family's attorneys, asked Leesfield for an award totaling $593.5 million.

"It's not the damages that matter to us," daughter Bonnie Anderson said after the trial. "We don't know whether we'll ever be able to collect anything. It's to have a
judge say that Howard Anderson was murdered and that he is getting justice in an American court."

She was 5 when her father was executed.

Anderson's widow, Dorothy Anderson McCarthy, and their children all testified during the trial.

Anderson's wife and children had moved to Miami in late 1960 fearing reprisals from the Castro government. Anderson remained in Havana to take care of the
family's businesses.

Bonnie Anderson, a former print and national television journalist, has twice been able to visit his grave.

She testified she went to Cuba in 1978 on assignment from The Miami Herald. She said she met Castro during a press conference, and he "knew who I was."

She was able to travel to western Cuba and found her father's untended grave at the rear of a municipal cemetery.

Twenty years later Anderson, then on assignment for CNN, again traveled to the cemetery, where the same caretaker led her to the grave site.

But this time, a teary-eyed Anderson testified, "There was just a hole in the ground. The caretaker said that someone had ordered that the remains be dug up, and
they were either burned and thrown out or just thrown out."