Yesterday the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) quietly removed a number of Cuba-related listings from its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list. These delistings included dissolved companies, dead people and Cuban ships that had either sunk or were out of commission. For example, Amado Padron Trujillo, designated in 1986,was executed in 1989. By Cuba. For treason. Talk about a guy who couldn’t get a break.

Also delisted was the late Alfred Stern, who was once accused of spying for the Soviet Union. He fled the United States, lived in Cuba from 1963 to 1970 and died in Prague in 1986. Another dead man taken off the SDN List was Carlos Duque, a business partner of Manuel Noriega, who stopped threatening the United States when he died last October.

Even though OFAC delisted dead people and sunken ships from the SDN List, it still could not bring itself to delist the probably fictional Daniel Garcia, who allegedly threatens the United States by running a non-existent talent agency, Promociones Artisticas (PROARTE), in Mexico City. The problem with designating a non-existent Daniel Garcia is that there are plenty of real people named Daniel Garcia who, as a result, cannot open bank accounts, get loans, buy automobiles, or get on an airplane without getting searched. We wrote about the curse of being named Daniel Garcia here.

I have been told, off the record, that no one at OFAC knows who Daniel Garcia is or was, if he ever was, and why he was put on the list in the first place. That, I’m told, is part of the reason that Daniel Garcia is fated to remain on the SDN List in perpetuity.

In short, since imaginary people never die, the real Daniel Garcias of the world are just going to have to live with it.

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