Juan Pablo Roque and his beautiful wife Ana Margarita were a dashing couple.
He was a Cuban Air Force jet pilot who had defected to the United States. The couple had met at a local church and later married.
Roque became a step dad to Ana Margarita's children and he became active in local Cuban Exile organizations including Brothers to the Rescue.
But it was all a sham. Roque was a spy, and he used Ana Margarita as a cover. He also was an informer pumping information about exile groups to the American FBI.
The day before the shoot down of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue airplanes which resulted in the death of four fliers, Roque quietly slipped back into Cuba. He had helped engineer the shoot down.
It was then that Ana Margarita realized she had been used, "raped" she would charge by the Cuban government to further their espionage activities in South Florida.
Ana Margarita sued and was awarded $27 million for pain and suffering as a victim of the Cuban spy scheme. That was 1999.
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Over ten years later, she has collected very little from frozen Cuban funds in the U.S.
But now a new move is being made by her lawyers.
The Obama administration has allowed Cubans with relatives on the island to travel freely to their homeland. They fly directly from the United States on charter airlines. The Cuban government gets a cut of those fares. The attorneys representing Ana Margarita have filed writs of garnishment on eight charter companies that operate out of Florida.
"These writs are not about politics or U.S. Cuba relations, and they are not about the right to travel to Cuba," Ana Margarita, who now uses her maiden name Martinez, wrote 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."
No comment from legal counsel representing the charter services named.
"I am only trying to intercept, before it leaves America, money that will otherwise be transferred to the Cuban government...That seems to be the only way Cuba will ever pay its legal debts to me," Martinez, who still lives in South Florida, said.
The story has been the subject of a book, a proposed motion picture and Ana Margarita Martinez story has been chronicled by a number of publications including The New York Times, The Los Angles Times, Time Magazine, and the Miami Herald.
