Washington Post
Thursday, August 13, 1998

When a federal judge last December awarded $187.6 million in damages to the families of three of the men shot down over international waters by Cuban Air Force MiGs in a 1996 incident, Miami attorney Frank R. Angones proclaimed: "Justice is done."

Well, not yet.

The ruling was the first time a federal court had held a foreign nation liable to U.S. citizens for a terrorist act under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. But the decision in the Brothers to the Rescue shooting ignited a debate in Washington over how the families can collect damages from a nation that the United States does not recognize.

That's why Greenberg Traurig Hoffman Lipoff Rosen & Quentel, one of the Miami law firms representing the families, is invoking its lobbying skills in the nation's capital. Its Washington office may be best known for lobbying on trade issues and buttonholing lawmakers on behalf of airlines, delivery companies and local governments, but Greenberg Traurig shareholder Ronald W. Kleinman recently began pressing for an amendment to the 1996 anti-terrorism law "to facilitate the execution of [the] judgments" against Cuba. Kleinman was a State Department lawyer in the 1980s.

What the families want is passage of legislation that would give their claims priority in tapping a fund of about $148 million in Cuban assets that the Treasury Department has frozen since 1962. President Clinton dipped into that fund last year and distributed $300,000 to each of the four families of the men who died in their unarmed planes.

The Clinton administration is opposed to allowing more money to be removed from the Cuban fund. There are nearly 6,000 other pending claims, totaling more than $1 billion, an administration official said.

Cuba did not defend itself against the lawsuit, saying that it did not recognize the U.S. court's jurisdiction.

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