Canadian denied U.S. fortune dies at 108 in Cuba

[Jimmy2]

Esteban Israel,

Published: Friday, April 03, 2009

HAVANA - A Canadian widow living in Cuba whose fortune was trapped in a Boston bank by the U.S. trade embargo died on Friday at the age of 108 without having ever gotten her money.

Mary McCarthy died in her rundown Havana mansion after failing to get treatment for respiratory problems due to a shortage of cash, according to Godson and heir Elio Garcia.

"She had been suffering the embargo for 50 years," he told Reuters.

McCarthy, born in St. John's, Newfoundland, in 1900, moved to Cuba in 1924 when she married her husband, a wealthy Havana-based Spanish businessman whom she had met at the Boston Opera.

She soon became a member of Cuba's high society, co-founding the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra and an orphanage for boys.

Her husband died in 1951, but she stayed in Cuba, even after the 1959 revolution when Fidel Castro took power and all the neighbors in her wealthy neighborhood fled to the United States.

She was not able to touch the money her husband left her after the United States imposed a trade embargo against Cuba in 1962, and had lived in near poverty for years.

In 2007, after a Canadian diplomat intervened, the U.S. government allowed her to withdraw $96 a month from the bank in Boston.

Garcia said McCarthy had to postpone treatment for respiratory problems when the United States did not transfer extra money allowed for medical purposes in time, and she died.

"People should not have to pay for the political circumstances. This is a problem between two governments," he said of the embargo.

She died early on Friday morning and in the afternoon, two dozen friends gathered in her home, where a candle burned atop the old Steinway piano where she had given music lessons.

They accompanied her humble coffin, wrapped in gray cloth, in a funeral procession to Columbus Cemetery, where she was buried next to her husband.

"Mary McCarthy was perhaps the best welder of the friendship between the people of Cuba and Canada," Canadian consul Mark Burger told the gathering.

She would have been 109 on April 27.