Descendants of nobleman hope to inherit $30-billion
Isabel Vincent. National
Post. March 31, 2001
REMEDIOS, Cuba - A few months ago, when the rumours were swirling that Cuban
leader Fidel Castro was close to repatriating one of the island's greatest
fortunes, the queues outside the San Juan Bautista de los Remedios Parish office
snaked around the dusty, sun-drenched main square of this small town, near the
island's northern coast.
Hundreds of people from all over Cuba, and from as far away as Texas and
California, stood for hours under a blistering afternoon sun, waiting patiently
as the chain-smoking church archivist -- a young man with a ponytail and
knee-length surfer shorts named Javier -- used an old Remington and two fingers
to type up the copies of birth and death certificates that he obtained from
worm-eaten 17th-century registry books stacked on his desk. The documents were
supposed to prove that the bearer was a direct descendant of Francisco Manso de
Contreras, a Spanish nobleman who arrived here in 1605 and amassed what has
become Cuba's most fabled fortune.
According to popular legend, Francisco's great-nephew deposited the family
fortune in an English bank in 1776. The heirs believe that the fortune -- chests
of gold and precious jewels -- now lies somewhere in a dusty corner of the Bank
of England.
The heirs, several thousand of whom are scattered throughout Cuba, the
United States and Spain, say the fortune could be worth upwards of US$30-billion
today. They say President Castro is secretly negotiating with the British
government, and that the return of the fortune is now imminent.
In Cuba, many of the heirs are so convinced that they will soon be receiving
a huge payoff that they have purchased cars and other luxury items on the
island, using their links to the family as credit.
Three of the Manso de Contreras heirs in Miami recently tried to purchase
million-dollar properties in South Florida using "proof" of their
descendancy -- the typewritten documents from the church archives in Remedios --
as collateral.
Recently, as rumours of the Manso de Contreras fortune spread throughout the
island and into Cuban-American communities scattered in the United States, the
heirs decided to organize. In Cuba, they have formed regional Manso de Contreras
committees, which meet regularly, with government permission, to discuss the
progress of the investigations and plans for the distribution of the money.
In Miami, some of the descendants have a Web site and have secured legal
counsel from Holland & Knight, one of the most important law firms in the
country. Through their relatives in Cuba, the Miami heirs have managed to obtain
old wills, and classified documents from the Cuban government that they say
prove the existence of the fortune. The Miami Cubans say they are poised to sue
the Cuban government if officials decide to cut them out of their inheritance.
In Cuba, the committees have reportedly pledged 25% of their shares of the
inheritance to the Cuban government in exchange for official co-operation.
There is one major problem, however: Nobody can seem to find the loot.
"We have found no evidence to suggest that there are large amounts of
unclaimed funds or even small amounts in the names of those people in the Bank
of England," said a spokeswoman for the Bank of England in London,
referring to the Manso de Contreras inheritance. "I'm afraid that from our
point of view, it is an apocryphal story."
Cuban government officials refuse to comment on the Manso de Contreras
issue, and a spokesman from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London said
in an interview last week, "We don't know anything about this."
Still, this doesn't seem to worry the heirs. Perhaps, they say, the fortune
is at some other bank in England, or even in Spain. Perhaps the Manso de
Contreras family member who made the deposit in 1776 did so under a trustee or a
different name. The latest theory is that the money may have ended up at the
Vatican, which may not be as farfetched as it sounds since the Manso de
Contreras were a powerful Catholic family in Cuba who donated much of their
wealth to the Catholic Church. For its part, the Vatican has refused to discuss
the issue.
In Miami, the lawyers working on the file are pursuing all of these avenues.
They admit they don't have many facts, but believe the Manso de Contreras
inheritance does exist.
"There is enough smoke here that warrants us doing more digging,"
said one of several Miami lawyers who has been retained by the Cuban-American
descendants, most of whom are well-to-do professionals whose families left Cuba
after the 1959 Revolution for political reasons.
"We are trying to sift through all of the rumours we are getting from
Cuba and find out the truth," said Arturo Barbeito, a Miami-based
businessman and potential heir. "We have retained attorneys to protect our
legal interests."
In Cuba, Manso de Contreras committee members also admit they have few
concrete facts. Their blind faith in the inheritance may offer an interesting
insight into the power of myth in contemporary Cuba. Perhaps after more than 40
years of Communist rule, thousands of Cubans have put their faith in a local
legend in order to escape bleak quotidian economic realities in a place where,
after the Soviets pulled out their financial aid in 1989, gasoline and food are
severely rationed. Professionals are forced to scrape by on their tiny wages and
infusions of cash from their relatives in the United States (if they're lucky),
and political freedom is non-existent.
Dulce Maria Rodriguez, a 33-year-old physician here, spent the equivalent of
three months' salary (about US$15) in order to obtain a birth certificate and
other documents that show one of her relatives was directly related to Francisco
Manso de Contreras, the wealthy landowner whose family controlled sugar
plantations in the surrounding countryside up until the 19th century.
"It was a huge sacrifice for us," said Ms. Rodriguez, who lives
with her husband and son in what used to be part of the living room of a
decrepit colonial mansion on one of the town's main streets. "I know the
money's there. My cousin, who is on one of the committees of inheritors, said
that each of us will get more than $300,000 when the government distributes the
money."
Ms. Rodriguez was recently sitting in the town's dusty municipal archives
with her cousin, Maria Hernandez, who was on her first visit to the island since
her family's departure in the aftermath of the 1959 Revolution. Ms. Hernandez, a
cancer researcher from Houston, pored over municipal registries looking for
clues that would lead her to the riches.
"I am certain that Fidel Castro is already spending the money,"
she said. "This money belongs to us and we want it back."
Like many of the descendants, Ms. Hernandez has little in the way of
tangible evidence to back up her claim.
"The story of the Manso de Contreras fortune has been in my family for
generations," said Ms. Hernandez. "My grandmother used to tell us that
we were directly related to Francisco Manso de Contreras, and that the family
had left a lot of money."
At the municipal archives in Remedios, the archivist, a shy, white-haired
woman in a matronly dress, has clearly seen this all before.
"So many people have come here in the last year about Manso de
Contreras," she said, wiping the mouse droppings off an old wooden table in
the tiny reading room. Such is the state of historic preservation in Cuba that
the archivist's main job is to take the mouldy registries and place them on the
ground of the archive's inner courtyard in the noon day sun to kill the bugs and
dry up the mould.
"But there is little information here about the fortune," said the
archivist, who did not want to be identified. "The government took most of
the important documents away a long time ago."
According to documents obtained by the National Post at colonial archives in
Seville, Spain, Francisco Manso de Contreras was a Spanish colonial official who
was sent by his cousin, King Philip III of Spain, to be the chief justice at the
Audiencia de Santo Domingo, the Spanish colonial court for the Caribbean region
located in what is now the Dominican Republic. His main job was to prosecute the
Dutch and French pirates who regularly disrupted Spain's trade on the carrera de
Indias, Spain's commercial trading route across the Atlantic. Cuba, a staging
point for fleets that transported gold, silver and other raw materials to Spain,
was the pirates' biggest target.
After serving several years in his post, don Francisco, as he was known to
his superiors in Spain, decided to settle in Remedios, along with his brother
Antonio. The brothers accumulated a great deal of wealth, which was passed down
to their descendants. But by 1776, the only direct descendants were three nuns,
who lived in a nearby convent. The nuns were so worried about safeguarding the
family fortune from the gangs of marauding pirates that they entrusted part of
it -- several chests of gold and precious stones -- to their nephew Joseph Manso
de Contreras y Perez del Prado. In November, 1776, Joseph boarded a ship called
the Titan, bound for England, where he reportedly deposited the loot. After
making the deposit, Joseph disappeared. It is not clear whether he returned to
Cuba or went to the family's ancestral home in Granada, Spain. He is not buried
in the family plot, which occupies a place of honour in the San Juan Bautista
Church here.
It wasn't until the 1940s that ordinary Cubans began to be interested in
reclaiming the fortune. At that time, the Cuban press was filled with
questionable articles, one of them claiming the Bank of England could no longer
afford the interest payments on the Manso de Contreras fortune, and called on
all of the heirs in Cuba to come forward to claim their inheritance. At the
time, there was a mad rush to Remedios to obtain the necessary documents, but no
money was recovered, according to Rafael Farto Munoz, a retired history
professor who scrapes by as a tour guide and local historian in Remedios.
"In 1947, one of the family members retained a lawyer to retrace
Joseph's steps in London, but when he got close to completing his research, he
disappeared," said Mr. Munoz, a slight stoop-shouldered academic who
chain-smokes filterless cigarettes in the sitting room of his home, where
various neighbours, one of them in curlers, regularly walk in to use the
telephone, the only one on his street.
Last year, just as the Cuban government was supposedly entering into
negotiations with the British over the Manso de Contreras loot, Mr. Munoz
published the first of what was to be a multi-part series on the fate of the
Manso de Contreras fortune in a national magazine called Cultura. The magazine
sold out its print run when the first part of his story was published in
October. Cultura's offices were swamped with phone calls from people from all
over the island seeking more information on the fortune, says Mr. Munoz.
"And then, when I picked up the magazine in November, I noticed that
they hadn't printed the next instalment," he said. "When I called the
editor, his only explanation was that he received orders from on high, from the
government, not to publish any more stories relating to the fortune."
Is it a cover-up by the Cuban government in order to hang onto the entire
inheritance? Or is this just more rumour-mongering?
Mr. Munoz cannot answer the question.
"But I'll tell you this," he says, taking a long drag of his
cigarette. "The Manso de Contreras legend is based on truth. The problem is
that people here only start looking for the money when they are faced with tough
economic times."
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