U.S., Cuba try to block money claim by downed pilots' kin

The Miami Herald February 17, 1999 U.S., Cuba try to block money claim by downed pilots' kin

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

             Lawyers for the U.S. government and Cuba's telephone company joined forces in a
             Miami courtroom Tuesday to block an attempt to award Cuban money to relatives of
             three Florida-based civilian pilots shot down by the Cuban air force.

             Attorneys for the relatives complained that the U.S. government was playing the
             role of Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip -- snatching the football away just as Charlie
             Brown was about to kick it.

             ``They don't want us to kick that ball, Aaron Podhurst told U.S. District Judge James
             Lawrence King, who awarded the relatives $187.6 million in damages after Cuban
             MiGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996.

             The relatives want to seize the money from U.S. phone company payments due to
             Havana or Cuban funds in U.S. accounts long frozen under the U.S. embargo
             against Cuba. King gave all parties 10 days to file more arguments before he makes
             the final decision.

             But the hearing prompted some unusual legal maneuvers in a dispute that features
             two nations long at odds, Cuba's ETECSA telephone company, eight private U.S.
             telephone companies and the survivors of the Brothers to the Rescue victims.

             Justice Department attorney David Anderson argued that a 1998 law that would
             have allowed the relatives to seize the frozen funds or telephone payments had been
             suspended by President Clinton to protect ``national security interests.

             Havana has repeatedly threatened to cut off all U.S.-Cuba telephone links if the
             relatives get the telephone money -- links that Anderson said are good for the U.S.
             policy of promoting people-to-people contacts with Cuba.

             Representing ETECSA, New York lawyer Eric Lieberman argued that since King's
             $187 million judgment was against the Cuban government and air force, the relatives
             should not be allowed to seize money due his client, ``a private company that has
             nothing to do with the Cuban government.

             Lawyers for ATT and MCI, two of the eight U.S. phone companies that pay
             ETECSA for Cuba's side of U.S.-Cuba telephone links, made the same argument
             but said the Cuban government owned 59 percent of ETECSA.

             One MCI attorney also argued that since his firm made its payments to Havana
             through a bank in Canada, that meant MCI did not have any ``debt to ETECSA that
             could be awarded to the relatives of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots.

             Lawyers for the relatives called that ``a money-laundering arrangement and noted
             that for years all U.S. licenses to the U.S. phone companies doing business with
             Cuba have referred to payments ``to the Cuban government.

``Now they come and they say no, not the government, but a separate entity called
ETECSA, Podhurst said.

             Anderson came under particularly sharp questioning by King as he argued that
             Cuba's frozen funds could not be seized by the relatives because of international
             treaties and prior claims by U.S. citizens whose Cuban properties were seized by the
             Castro government in the early 1960s.

             ``I just wonder how long we're going to have to wait. Another 40 years? King said,
             going on to ask: ``And, would the United States have protected the assets of Adolf
             Hitler from victims of the Holocaust?

Anderson went on to argue that allowing U.S. citizens to seize such foreign funds
might also complicate a U.S. president's handling of foreign affairs.

The complications would set in ``when the president decides to normalize relations
with countries such as Cuba . . . that's what we're looking at here, Anderson said.

King retorted that ``when the time comes . . . I suppose we'd have to have some
promise from that government to stop murdering our citizens.