Lawyer Nicolas Gutierrez takes on property "traffickers".
Miami attorney Nicolas J. Gutierrez Jr. has made it his life's work pursuing lawsuits against people and companies who "traffic" in property confiscated by the Castro regime.
Gutierrez, 43, was born in Costa Rica to Cuban exile parents. He graduated from the University of Miami in 1985 and from Wash-ington's Georgetown Univer-sity Law Center in 1988.
The lawyer currently represents around 350 clients who have filed claims under Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which bars foreign investors from dealing in land confiscated by the Cuban government after 1959.
That may seem like a large number, but it really isn't when considering the fact that some 9,000 U.S. corporations and individuals have filed claims against the Castro government. Of that total, 5,911 have been certified by the U.S. Claims Settlement Commission, an agency of the Department of Justice.
Those individual claimants include people who were Cuban nationals at the time of the confiscation of their properties.
"Court lawsuits can now only be brought based upon common-law principles, which is difficult and subject to many legal hurdles, since Title III lawsuits under Helms-Burton are currently suspended," says Gutierrez.
"So far, default judgments have only been obtained against the Cuban government [not private foreign traffickers], in cases involving death, torture, rape, etc., not for property confiscation," Gutierrez recently told CubaNews.
