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- The quest for Cuba's lost gold
According to 20,000
Cubans, the Bank of England's vaults are stuffed
with treasure which belongs
to them. They believe they are the heirs to
a fortune sent to this country
for safe-keeping in 1776. But does it
even exist? Tom Gibb on a 400-year-old
mystery Thursday February 3,
2000 When Norma Perez brought the news to
the small town of Esperanza,
it spread as only rumours in Cuba can. A spindly
woman in her 50s,
Norma talks in an urgent conspiratorial whisper, at a
speed which even
Cubans find hard to follow. The Contreras fortune, she
told people,
really exists. The money is sitting in the vaults of the Bank
of
England waiting to be claimed. She heard it from a friend who used to
be a bodyguard of Fidel Castro, who had heard them talking about it in
the Council of State. It must be true.
The
other heirs were already organising to reclaim it. If the
Contreras did
not hurry, they would get left out. Norma's news unleashed
a gold fever
which has spread the length and breadth of the communist-ruled
island,
even crossing over to the mainland US and Florida. The story of
the
Contreras lost gold is an old one, passed down over at least a century.
But it has found its most fertile ground to reflower in today's Cuba of
frustrated dreams, uncertainties and shortages. The full version is told
in a series of highly sensationalist articles published in the Cuban
magazine
Bohemia in 1946, now being photo-copied and passed from hand
to hand in
villages across the country. The tale starts with Don
Francisco Manzo de
Contreras, King Phillip II of Spain's chief justice
for the Indies. He
arrived in Cuba to clean up smuggling in 1599. He
settled in the town of
Remedios on Cuba's north coast and over the next
150 years the family became
exceedingly rich. In 1776, according to
Bohemia, the sole heirs of the
fortune were three nuns. The articles
describe in great detail how, frightened
of pirate raids, they secretly
took six chests of gold from their hiding
place in the walls of the
Santa Clara convent in the dead of night and
sent them off to London
with a trusted nephew, Joseph Manzo de Contreras
y Perez de Prado.
The magazine quotes florid conversations
between Don Francisco
and his trusted servant and between the nuns and
their nephew, along with
descriptions of the voyage and a portrait of
Joseph standing proudly in
London - all, it seems, the product of the
journalist's highly vivid imagination.
The final article features a
group of humble sweet-makers in the small
village of Majagua in central
Cuba - heirs of the "bounteous fortune",
who, says the
chronicler, are about to become millionaires. Fifty-four
years later,
Angel Contreras, one of those interviewed, is still waiting
for a
fortune which so far has only brought the family misfortune. Majagua
is
a hot, dusty little town with a typical Cuban mix of old-style red-tiled
houses and Soviet apartment blocks. There is a factory for canning fruit
preserves, but the family sweet-making business long since succumbed to
collectivisation. Angel assures me that in the 1920s his great-grandfather
once had the receipt from the Bank of England. But it did him little good.
"They put him in a madhouse," Angel says, "and then they
killed him. All for greed. They wanted the money." Angel is never
precise about exactly who "they" were. However, they never got
the receipt because his uncle had hidden it. Unfortunately, he too was
murdered and the receipt has remained lost ever since. Of course in Cuba
such things no longer happen, he tells me. But outside, in London or the
capitalist world, he warns, I had better be careful. "You should have
a bodyguard," he says. "And make sure you are not followed.
Otherwise
they will wait until you are close to the inheritance - and
then kill you!"
After Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, Cubans had
other dreams to occupy
their minds and the inheritance was forgotten
for a while. The new National
Bank president, Ernesto Guevara, summed
up the revolutionary attitude to
money by signing the notes with a
derisory "Che". But the collapse
of the Soviet bloc has
brought the island back down to earth with a crash.
There is still
support for the practical achievements of the revolution,
the health
and education systems and low levels of crime. But the end of
the
millennium has left many people casting around for something in which
to believe. The news that Norma brought spread quickly. Members of the
Manzo and Loyola families, also heirs, were organising to get the money,
she said.
The Contreras - who are mostly
descended from African slaves
- were going to get left out. Over the
next six months, led by a fiery
orator called Roberto Perez, who is
married to a member of the family,
the Contreras got to work. They put
out messages on the local radio to
contact all the possible heirs.
Committees were formed to draw up family
trees. Roberto travelled up
and down the country holding public meetings
in town halls, accompanied
always by a large man of few words who he only
half-jokingly referred
to as his bodyguard. Roberto spoke with the passion
of a born-again
preacher - but using the slogans of the revolution. He
assured people
that the inheritance had never been recovered before the
revolution
because only individual heirs had applied. It would be different
if all
the heirs reclaimed it. "I've said it a thousand times,"
he
told a crowd of several thousand in the city of Camaguey. "Our
strength is in unity." It's a slogan which everyone in Cuba has heard
many times. Through unity, Roberto said, they would also find the missing
documents needed to prove their claim. He called the meetings "family
gatherings". He assured his audiences that he had informed the
Council
of State what they were doing. But, he said, the state is not
involved.
Of course no one believed him. For 40 years nothing has moved
in Cuba without
Communist party authorisation. How could such a
movement grow up, with
announcements on state-controlled radio, without
government involvement?
"Why don't they just tell us whether it is
true or not?" was
the constant complaint. Roberto was too
autocratic to last long. He was
also accused of deviating funds to hold
unauthorised events, such as a
pig roast. He was ousted from the
leadership by a collective decision -
intended to re-impose order. In
fact it led to more division. The family
is now split into two main
groups - with a total of some 20,000 possible
heirs affiliated.
What is happening pales alongside their cousins'
experience
in Florida. The Manzos in Miami are waging their own battle.
Last month
they occupied the street in front of the British consulate
in Miami. They
shouted slogansagainst the Queen, accusing her of
sending their money
to the tyrant Fidel Castro through British aid
programmes in Cuba. Nine
of them were arrested for causing a
disturbance. Adelaida Leopo, the church
archivist at Remedios, back
where it all started in 1599, has also been
busy. Every day there is a
line outside her door of possible heirs looking
for the documents to
prove their descent. Adeleida hammers out copies of
18th-century birth
certificates on an ancient typewriter with stoical patience.
"I do
whatever I can to help," she says. "These people are
doing
this because of the poverty in the country. Before, if one talked
of
inheritances, people took no notice. Now everyone is looking for
one."
She says many of those who have visited are lawyers,
engineers, doctors
and other professionals. They are looking for
something to believe in and
to fill up their time, she says. Many have
met cousins they did not know
existed in her office as the family trees
sprout new branches. "That's
very beautiful," she says.
"I am happy to keep a dream alive
for them." People are
convinced the Cuban and British governments
have already reached a
deal. There are rumours that the government will
be handing out credit
cards for them to spend their money. They will be
able to buy Ladas,
but not new cars. Many people have borrowed money on
the strength of
the inheritance. One man actually divorced so that his
stepchildren
would not be able to claim it. The need to believe is much
more
powerful than any other argument. And why not? A large part of the
population in today's Cuba live off money from abroad - either from
tourism
or remittances sent from family members in Florida which make
up the island's
largest hard currency sources. Why not place one's
hopes in a lost inheritance?
But the
hopes are not likely to be realised in any great hurry.
The Bank of
England was brief and to the point on the subject. "I
am afraid
that there are no unclaimed monies in the names you mentioned,
and the
story must go down as a myth. We have been receiving requests on
these
lines from Cubans for some time now and I must say we have searched
our
records thoroughly and can find no trace."
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- Try telling that to the Cubans.
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