In 1963, Fidel Castro arrived at a tobacco farm in Pinar del Río, accompanied by a convoy of five jeeps and some binoculars. He got out, surveyed the area, and from that moment on, the property was declared a Heritage Site of Cuba. Its owner, the father of Juan Omar Sixto, was the third-largest tobacco producer in the province.
Sixto, today the president of the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce, recounted this episode in an interview with Tania Costa for CiberCuba, detailing what set his father's farm apart from the other properties in the area.
"My father's farm was the only one that had, facing the road, a row of palm trees extending for a kilometer," Sixto explained. This visual uniqueness captured the dictator's attention. While all the neighboring farms were either destroyed or abandoned by the regime, that one remained almost intact for nearly four decades.
"All the farms around were mistreated, except for that one. It was left untouched for almost 40 years because Fidel Castro had fallen in love with it. He knew that in the end, the farm would belong to him," Sixto stated.
The pattern described is consistent with historical records documenting the dictator's use of dozens of estates and state residences throughout the island, several of which are located in Pinar del Río.
Castro's visit to the estate coincided with the Second Agrarian Reform Law, enacted on October 3, 1963, which reduced the limit of private property to five caballerías and impacted around 10,000 estates across the country.
Sixto left Cuba in 1964, a year after his brothers did. For decades, he did not want to return.
"I didn't want to return to Cuba. I told myself: I will go back when Cuba is free." However, her younger brother asked to visit the island in 2018, and she agreed. Upon arriving in her hometown, they discovered the abandonment that the land had suffered. What they found was devastating.
"Of the 13 tobacco houses, the two tractors, the 500 cattle, and the mango fields, there was nothing left, nothing. Only a dilapidated house remained," he recounted.
The estate that Castro had preserved for forty years out of personal whim ultimately ended up destroyed anyway. Around fifteen years before Sixto's visit, the regime had abandoned it to its fate.
"I thought, 'What happened here, a cyclone, a disaster?' That's what I saw. The palms were dying. There is only 30% of the palms that used to be here," he described.
Sixto's father arrived in exile with nothing. He started from scratch and managed to rebuild his life. This family journey of loss and reconstruction is part of the driving force that led Sixto to found the CANCC, an organization that conditions any investment in Cuba on a real political transition with legal guarantees for private property.
The conflict over the confiscated properties remains unresolved more than six decades later.
The certified claims of American citizens and companies amount to over 9 billion dollars, and this month the regime indicated its willingness to negotiate regarding nationalized properties.
"You see. That's the story of the Cuban exile. To build, lose everything, and start over," Sixto concluded.
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