Ana Margarita Martinez

Ana Margarita Martinez, the ex-wife of Cuban double agent Juan Pablo Roque, is attempting to file a lawsuit in Florida against American companies that provide travel service between Florida and Cuba. If she’s successful in freezing funds those companies currently pay to Cuba’s Havanatur, it could make it more difficult for Cuban Americans to visit relatives in their homeland.

News of the lawsuit comes from Inter Press Services, quoting reports in Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper.

1995 wedding: in happier times

In 2000, Martinez won an unprecedented "rape" case ruling against Roque—essentially for not telling her he was a spy when he married her in 1995, less than a year before he returned to Cuba. The next year, the Florida courts ordered the Cuban government to pay Martinez $27 million in damages for what the Miami Herald described as "her pain and suffering as a victim of Roque’s spy scheme and in punitive damages because Roque used his sham marriage to infiltrate South Florida’s Cuban exile community and Brothers to the Rescue, the volunteer pilots who search the seas for Cuban rafters."

"These writs are not about politics or U.S. Cuba relations, and they are not about the right to travel to Cuba," Martinez argued in a press release. "They are not a political act or an effort to hurt U.S. businesses or interfere with air travel to Cuba."

Martinez is attempting to interest a Hollywood filmmaker into making a movie of her story.