14ymedio, Havana, 6 March 2024 — An American doctor, Javier García-Bengochea, has sued the Airbnb platform for renting a property in Havana confiscated by Fidel Castro in 1960. According to the Nuevo Herald, the lawsuit was filed on Monday in the court of the central district of Florida, based in Orlando.
The property subject to the lawsuit is a six-unit building — defined in the Airbnb ad as “magnificent” and “elegant” — located at number 1212 on 33rd Avenue, in Miramar, built in 1939 by the Parreño family. One of its members, Alberto Parreño, died in 1972, and the plaintiff’s cousin inherited the property from him.
In 1970, explains the Herald, the Foreign Claims Resolution Commission of the Department of Justice certified the claim of Alberto Parreño, then a US citizen, to a third of the land and the building, valuing his loss at $66,666 in the 1960s (equivalent to almost $700,000 today).
The complaint brought by Javier García-Bengochea, family estate administrator, alleges that Airbnb “continued to advertise the property between August 2019 and May 2022,” after being notified that it was subject to a claim, and that it had “trafficked the property consciously, voluntarily, intentionally and continuously,” at least since 2017.
The doctor, a neurosurgery specialist and resident of Jacksonville, sued the State Department in 2009 for renting a penthouse in another building owned by his family to house American diplomats.
It’s not the first time that the doctor, a specialist in neurosurgery
