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

By Esteban Israel

HAVANA (Reuters) - 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 neighbours in her wealthy neighbourhood 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 (65 pound) a month from the bank in Boston.