Congress demands controversial nominee make promise on Cuba claims.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the candidacy of Mauricio Tamargo, an aide to Cuban-American Rep. Ros Lehtinen, (R-FL) to head the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. But not before the nominee vowed that a new claims category for Cuban exiles who lost property during Fidel Castro's expropriations would be a violation of international law. Whether Cuban Americans, who were not US citizens at the time of the expropriations, would ever be allowed to press their property claims at the settlement commission is of keen interest to several of the largest of the 5,911 US claimants with demands on Cuba. Representatives of these plaintiffs persuaded Sen. Patrick Leahy, (D-VT), the head of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Richard Durbin, (D-IL) to press Tamargo, on the issue. The US claimants feared that a 1998 law that allowed the State Department to create new categories of claimants might dilute their abilities to receive compensation. Tamargo, they believed, would readily implement a new Cuban-American claimant program because the congressional aide was heavily involved in promoting the approval of the Helms-Burton Act, which established the rights of Cuban claimants to sue foreign companies that benefit from their seized property in federal courts. But, in written answers to the senator's questions on the issue, Tamargo said "a claims program which allows non-citizens at the time of their loss to file claims with the commission would run counter to congressional intent."

Cuban-American lawmakers support administration's choice

Ros-Lehtinen, Tamargo's boss of 20 years, assured the Democratic senators at the nominee's Senate hearing that Tamargo was a hard-working man who keeps his word. The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission is a little-known agency that handles all property claims by Americans against foreign countries. It has a staff of 11 attorneys.