Cuban-American attorney Willy Allen revealed this Monday, during the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States, that his family has been connected to the history of the country for two and a half centuries, from the battlefields of the war of independence to a small town in Maryland where his first cousin lives today.
The anecdote emerged before Allen discussed the case of a Cuban mother detained by ICE, when the program's host, Tania Costa, asked him how he had experienced Independence Day. The response opened a window to a little-known family story.
“Look, one of my ancestors was a captain in the Maryland militias and fought for the independence of the United States, and his name was Edward Allen,” the lawyer stated.
According to Allen, that connection to the past did not fade into oblivion. A distant cousin of his conducted a thorough genealogical research decades ago, which allowed for the tracing of the lineage and uncovered surprising details about Edward Allen's life after the war.
“Today, 250 years after American independence, my cousin Roberto Allen lives on what used to be Edward's farm, not on his own farm, but on the land that he eventually sold and that became a town,” he explained.
The family investigation also revealed that Edward Allen did not settle for having fought for the new nation. In the early 19th century, he took the federal government to court. "We found that he, in the early 19th century, sued the federal government for taxes they were charging him and for the pension as a military veteran of the war of independence that they had not paid him, which was overdue," Allen detailed.
The lawyer summed up the story with a phrase that combines pride and humor: "So not only did we fight for the independence of the state from the American empire, but from the very beginning, we also filed a lawsuit to get him paid his retirement debt as a military man and to have the taxes imposed on his estate reduced."
The surname Allen is unusual in Cuba, something that the host of the program acknowledged during the conversation. Allen explained that the family branch has Icelandic-Scottish origins and arrived on the island through Missouri, Kansas, and finally New York. "There are actually two Allen families in Cuba, who are not immediate relatives," he clarified.
It was precisely in New York where the family story took another notable turn. Willy Allen's grandfather, Nesbitt Allen, met his grandmother Rosalía Vives Vilches, who was studying as a boarder at the Sagrado Corazón in New York in the 19th century. The couple married in Manhattan in 1890.
Allen also mentioned that his daughter lived for nine years three blocks away from the historic apartment where Nesbitt and Rosalía lived after getting married, and that she has been on the waiting list to rent that same apartment for two years.
The program was broadcast around July 4, 2026, when the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of its independence with massive events in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York, among other cities.
Allen concluded his narrative with a reflection on the nation that his ancestor helped to found. "What I like is that almost the majority, a large part of the empire's team, are immigrants or children of immigrants. So the empire benefits from the products that immigrants bring."
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