The Miami Herald profiled former Ambassador V. Manuel Rocha in 2003 when he joined the firm of Steel Hector & Davis to help open doors in Latin America.
Raul Rubiera | Miami Herald | Getty Images
Rocha’s arrest last year stunned the diplomatic community, in part because of his longevity as an agent—more than 40 years, much of it spent working for the US State Department, including a stint as US ambassador to Bolivia and another at the National Security Council.
In exchange for a reduced sentence, Rocha’s agreement requires him to cooperate with prosecutors and reveal what clandestine activities he performed for Cuba.
Carolyn Lamb hopes that process will reveal what Rocha was up to in her living room nearly 20 years.
Lamb describes how Rocha traveled across the country in 2007, and offered to purchase the paper claims to an 80-acre farm, a 1959 Buick, and thousands of shares in the Cuban Telephone Company that belonged to Lamb’s father before they were seized by the Castro regime.
The former Coca-Cola building in Havana, ironically painted the company colors. The Building now houses the headquarters of the state-owned “Beverage Company of Havana”.
Justin Solomon | CNBC
Castro didn’t nationalize just American property; he seized all private property. Every home and every business became the property of the government, and none of the owners were paid for them. With few exceptions, that is still true today.
In 1970, the US government valued Lamb’s claim at $489,208, and set an annual interest rate of 6% from the date of loss to the date of settlement. Under that formula, the Cubans owe $1.9 million on the claim today. That number gets bigger every day that goes by without a settlement.
“They told me my claim was crap,” Lamb says of Rocha and a business partner with him that day in Omaha. They offered her $114,000 for the claim. Lamb said she was insulted and suspicious of what she saw as such a low-ball offer.
There are nearly 6,000 American claims to property and land in Cuba, all of it seized by Fidel Castro’s government after his 1959 coup d’etat. The value of the claims totals more than $7 billion, and many are held by major U.S. brands like Pepsi, General Electric, and Twentieth Century Fox.
A former Woolworth’s store which is now used as a “10 Cent Store”, the equivalent of a dollar store in the United States.
Justin Solomon | CNBC
This wide scale confiscation of Americans’ property was one of the chief reasons the United States imposed an embargo on Cuba more than 60 years ago.
Before the embargo can be lifted, the claims for those properties must be settled.
“It’s still one of the biggest impediments to normalization of relations with Cuba,” says Jason Poblete, Lamb’s attorney.
“Was [Rocha] part of a scheme to help depress the value of these claims, to give an escape clause to the Cuban government?” Poblete wondered aloud.
The lower the value of the claims, the less the Cuban government would have to pay in any future negotiated settlement.
Poblete also wondered if Rocha was thwarting the process. “Did he make it harder to settle the claims issue?” he said in an interview with CNBC.
It would be helpful to the Cubans to have information from Rocha because in a negotiation on the claims “any intelligence you could get would be useful,” said John Kavulich, head of the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.
The former Sears Roebuck and Co. in Havana is now a computer center for Cubans to use the internet.
Justin Solomon | CNBC
But if Rocha’s participation in the claims buying business was indeed part of his covert work, that would come as news to his business partner.
Timothy Ashby says he was “astonished” by Rocha’s arrest because “He was almost too right wing to be believed,” and Ashby couldn’t imagine Rocha working for a communist government.
But looking back on it, Ashby says there were signs. “He had a chip on his shoulder about rich people.”
And that’s not all. “Once a week he would have the offices swept for bugs…
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