Former CIA Operative Awarded One Billion Dollars For Emotional Suffering Caused By Che Guevara

Miami-Dade judge Peter Adrien has awarded 73-year-old Gustavo Villoldo, a former CIA operative who had a hand in taking down Che Guevara, $1 billion following Villoldo’s claims that Fidel Castro and Guevara ruined his father’s businesses and drove him to suicide in 1959. 

Judge Adrien says he awarded Villoldo such a huge amount of money because he wanted to garner attention from the Cuban government, who has of yet not responded to the suit nor made an effort to offer a defense in court. 

Whether or not Villoldo will be able to collect the money is another story, as Cuba has various bank accounts thought to be scattered over different parts of the world that would need to be unfrozen. The last such eye-grabbing settlement in a lawsuit against the Cuban government was awarded to Brothers to the Rescue to the tune of $187 million. The account from which the money was taken had been located by the U.S. Treasury Department in a New York City bank. Villoldo’s lawyer believes there are several hundreds of millions more in the New York account, and that there is likely to be additional money in a Spanish account.

Villoldo’s Wharton-educated father had left his law practice in order to open a General Motors dealership and distribution center in Habana. In the months before the Cuban Revolution, Gustavo Villoldo Sr.’s annual earnings were around $15 million. The Cuban Revolution saw the Villoldo family lose  a waterfront compound, a home in Varadero, and a third home in Baracoa as well as apartment buildings in Miramar and Habana, a farm and other property. It did not take long for the lucrative business to catch the eye of Che Guevara, who had been named head of Cuba’s Banco Nacional. The dealership was looted and destroyed and all the Villoldo sons were questioned and threatened with facing a firing squad. Twelve hours after Gustavo Villoldo, Sr. was himself questioned by Guevara, he swallowed a bottle of pills and died.

And because, sometimes, when life gives you lemons, you make a lemon-scented dead Argentine, Gustavo Villoldo Jr. was eventually recruited to work for the CIA and played an instrumental role in tracking down Che Guevara in Bolivia. 

We cannot even wrap our minds around this. On the one hand, we’re sure it sends a message to the Cuban government that (some in) the U.S. see the actions of those involved in the Cuban Revolution as unethical, but we’re not sure how we feel about reparations in general and for Cuban exiles in particular. We’re more inclined to feel that the government has an obligation to protect and ensure a good quality of lie for Cubans currently on the island and that, in their failure to do that, do owe them something. We’re not so sure that our own family would seek or take monetary reparation for having been an unsavory part of history and would instead hope that future governments on the island would learn from the failures and crimes of Castro’s government and would seek to move away from that. 

Anyway, damn. What do you all think of this?

Man who tracked Che for CIA awarded $1 billion in lawsuit [McClatchy]