US Judges Doing Their Part on Cuba

By Circles Robinson

HAVANA TIMES, August 23 – Anti-Cuba activist judges are helping make it difficult for any US government to lift the 50-year economic blockade on Cuba.  By awarding huge sums in suits against Cuba the courts try to tie the administrations hands on foreign policy.

The latest claim was from Sherry Sullivan, of Befast, Maine, who felt she deserved money because her father, Geoffrey Sullivan, was killed on a covert mission in Cuba in 1963.

The suit was against ex-president Fidel Castro the current leader Raul Castro and the Cuban army.  Cuba, defenseless in US courts, feels such suits are totally illegitimate.

The official Cuban press noted Friday that Judge Jefrey Hjelm ruling was based on “inconclusive evidence” from the plaintiff.

In an even zanier ruling, in May 2009 a Florida court granted Cuban-Americans Gustavo Villoldo and his brother Alfredo damages of US $1 billion for the suicide of their father, a wealthy Cuban businessman who died shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Jeremy Alters, said at the time, “any thaw in relations between Cuba and the United States should include satisfaction of judgments against Cuba,” reported AP.

Relatives of other former US soldiers of fortune or fervent anti-communists have successfully sued Cuba for having defended itself against their brazen incursions.

In one 2006 case, a New York court awarded US $91 million dollars from frozen Cuban accounts to relatives of two men who died after the failed April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

In 2001, other relatives obtained a court award of $93 million resulting from their loved ones being shot down from the sky after carrying out one of many illegal missions into Cuban airspace organized by the Miami-based organization Brothers to the Rescue.