Erwin Harris, Ad Executive Who Seized Cuban Assets, Dies at 91
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Version 0 of 1. Erwin Harris left behind a respectable record of achievement as an advertising executive, an estimable collection of Chinese antiquities (his lifelong hobby), a loving family and a remarkable if little-remembered role in the tortured history of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba in the early 1960s. Mr. Harris, a Yonkers-born World War II veteran who died in Miami on March 9 at 91, probably did not tip the scales of history. But from 1960 to 1961, armed with nothing more than a court order from a Florida judge and accompanied by local sheriff’s deputies, he scoured the East Coast confiscating Cuban government property — including the state airplane Fidel Castro parked in New York while on a visit. It was a dogged mission in pursuit of compensation for what he said Mr. Castro owed him: $429,000 in unpaid bills stemming from an advertising campaign promoting Cuban tourism. At different times, Mr. Harris seized two Cubana Airlines passenger planes, five cargo planes, a Cuban Navy vessel and a boatload of 1.2 million Cuban cigars arriving in Tampa, Fla. In Key West, he appropriated train cars carrying 3.5 million pounds of cooking lard bound for Havana. Temporary lard rationing in Cuba ensued. In September 1960, he took control of Mr. Castro’s personal government plane while Mr. Castro was in New York for a 10-day official visit, and began arranging to have it auctioned. (“Cuban Airliner Seized Here,” trumpeted the front page of The Daily News.) The Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, stepped in to replace the plane Mr. Harris had snatched, and on Sept. 28, a reporter watching Mr. Castro board the Soviet aircraft at Idlewild Airport (now Kennedy International) described him as smiling “almost defiantly.” By then, Mr. Castro had added airplane stealing to the litany of abuses he said were being perpetrated against his country by the American government. In a fiery four-hour speech to the United Nations, he said the purpose of the abuse was to restore Cuba to its prerevolutionary status as “a colony” of the United States and American monopolies. Despite heated phone calls between United Nations officials and the State Department, half the members of the Cuban delegation were still scrambling for flights home and the rest were returning on the Soviet aircraft. Philip Brenner, a professor of international relations at American University in Washington, said a tense and hectic atmosphere that week probably helped Mr. Harris carry out his seizures, especially of Mr. Castro’s turboprop plane. Debates had erupted over United Nations membership for the People’s Republic of China, Soviet and American officials were jockeying over proposed disarmament talks, and the first presidential debate between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon was broadcast that week. “Everything was so wild, I’d guess the authorities were just blindsided by this guy,” Dr. Brenner said. Many of Mr. Harris’s seizures were contested, and some properties, including Mr. Castro’s plane, were returned. Mr. Harris recovered part of his money, though not all, selling confiscated property at auction far below its value. His wife, Theresa, who confirmed his death, said he was eventually forced to file for bankruptcy. Mrs. Harris said her husband was motivated by simple indignation and a wish to be paid. As far as she knew, she said, he never received help from intelligence agencies in locating Cuban assets, though he had served in an Army counterintelligence unit during World War II. Erwin Goldblum Harris was born in Yonkers on Aug. 15, 1921, to Jacob Goldblum and the former Annie Harris. Though Jewish, he took his mother’s maiden name while serving in Europe during the war, to avoid being sent to a Nazi death camp if he were captured. He received a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a postgraduate degree in aerial photomapping from Columbia. Besides his wife, Mr. Harris, who lived in Miami, is survived by a daughter, Jayne Abess; two sons, Michael and Jack; and three grandchildren. After the war, he worked in public relations and advertising before starting his own agency, Harris & Company, in Miami in 1952. It was soon thriving, representing luxury resorts and hotels in Miami and throughout Latin America. In Havana, where American organized-crime families operated with impunity for years, mob figures like Meyer Lansky were among his clients. When Mr. Castro rose to power, the mob fled, but Mr. Harris stayed. He told interviewers that he had arranged a meeting with Mr. Castro shortly after the revolution. In court testimony later filed in his delinquency claim, he said that he had received a $1.5 million advertising contract from the new government to promote tourism in Cuba, and that Mr. Castro had signed off on it. Mr. Harris placed ads in newspapers and magazines all over the Western Hemisphere. One, appearing in The New York Times on Feb. 21, 1960, began, “If Cuba could be said to have one predominant art it would have to be the art of living.” For a time, the Cuban government sent him a monthly check. In 1960, when the checks stopped, Mr. Harris said he was left with $429,000 in unpaid bills. By his account, he went to see the Cuban finance minister, Che Guevara, who kept him waiting for hours. “Che laughed in his face and threw him out of the office,” Mrs. Harris said. “Then he threatened to kill every member of his family if he ever came back.” Mr. Harris pursued his claim in Florida for almost a year before receiving a court authorization, known as a writ of attachment, allowing him to seize Cuban assets. His prize confiscation, Mr. Castro’s plane, was returned in 1961 in a deal between the United States and Cuba. In exchange, Mr. Castro turned over an Eastern Airlines passenger plane that had been headed for Tampa that year when a Cuban hijacker seized it and diverted it to Havana. Though they were married for more than 40 years, Mrs. Harris said there was always something engagingly mysterious about her husband. His interests in travel, art and culture took him to every part of the world, she said. He often traveled alone to China and South Asia, studying Han dynasty antiquities. In 1989, he happened to be in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests. “With Erwin, he just did things other people don’t do,” she said. “We always speculated whether his activities found him in the right places at the wrong times, or the wrong places at the right times.” |