Cuba Ordered To Pay $187 Million To Families Of Dead Pilots
The Cuban government and its air force “murdered” four pilots for an exile group whose two unarmed civilian planes were shot down nearly two years ago, and must pay $187.6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to their families, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
The award, after a three-day nonjury trial last month in wrongful-death lawsuits by the families of three of the four victims, came in the first case to be tried under a 1996 federal law, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which allows suits seeking remedy for the terrorist killing of U.S. citizens by foreign governments.
The law gives plaintiffs a chance to collect a judgment if they can locate assets of the foreign state in the United States.
It is unclear how the families are to collect the money. Their lawyers conceded there was little chance to recover the $137.7 million in punitive damages the judge awarded against the Cuban air force. But they said they would seek authority from the president or Congress to collect the $49.9 million in compensatory damages from the approximately $148 million the United States holds in Cuban assets that were frozen in 1963.
“It would make no sense for our Congress to pass a statute for the president to sign it without putting some teeth into it, not only to give justice to our clients and their families but to deter this kind of action in the future,” said Aaron Podhurst, a lawyer for the families. “This is the first time there’s a federal judgment that can be executed against a government. I think we have a reasonable chance.”
In a November 1996 executive order, President Clinton released $1.2 million to the families from the frozen assets as a humanitarian gesture. It was the first time such assets had been released, the Treasury Department said.
On Wednesday the White House referred questions to the State Department, where spokesman James Foley called the matter “private litigation” and had no comment.
But an administration official said that should the White House get a request from the pilots’ families to release more of the Cuban money held in the United States, “we’d consider it carefully.”
But the official said that the judge’s ruling made no mention of the frozen assets and that any such request would have to be weighed alongside the “thousands” of pending claims against Cuba from other Americans who lost property after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959.
The four dead men belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American volunteer pilot group that was known for its air searches for seagoing Cuban refugees, but which had also swooped over Havana to drop anti-Castro leaflets.
On Feb. 24, 1996, during what the group said was one of its humanitarian missions, two of its planes were shot down by Cuban fighter jets in an act that drew international condemnation and led to a hardening of U.S. policy toward Cuba.
The Cuban government, which has maintained that the pilots violated its airspace, did not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and chose not to defend itself in the trial.