India, April 23 -- Deeply ingrained in Raul Valdes-Fauli's family lore is the November 1960 day when an agent of Fidel Castro's revolution showed up at his family's Pedroso Bank in Havana, with a machine gun, and demanded they leave.

Calling his father and uncle gusanos - or worms, a Spanish-language term coined by Castro to denigrate those fleeing the island - the agent seized the bank and, in an instant, dispossessed a family that arrived from Spain in the 16th century.

"They told them this was now the people's bank," said Valdes-Fauli, an attorney and former mayor of the Miami suburb of Coral Gables.

"They couldn't even take family pictures off the walls of their office." Seven decades later such traumatic episodes are resurfacing w...