CORAL GABLES, Fla. – Raul Masvidal, a banker and real estate developer who The New York Times referred to as a Cuban-American civic leader and The Miami Herald as “the most powerful Cuban in Miami” in the 1980s, died on Tuesday. He was 82.
Before earning a business degree from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, Masvidal was among the exiles who trained with the U.S. Army at Fort Knox and served with the CIA’s clandestine efforts.
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While Masvidal was a University of Miami student, he also worked at the former Everglades Hotel in valet parking at 244 Biscayne Boulevard, in downtown Miami. He was known as a self-made man.
The son of a physician left Havana for Miami as a teenager after Fidel Castro took power, and went on to become a vice president at Citibank while living in New York City and Europe.
The Miami Herald reported Masvidal ran the Royal Trust Bank and owned Biscayne Bank and Miami Savings Bank. He was among the founding members of the Cuban American National Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit organization.
At 43, as a newcomer in local politics, Masvidal campaigned to become Miami’s first Cuban-American mayor. He lost to Xavier Suarez, the father of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez.
Masvidal continued his activism behind the scenes.
“He was, at the time we spoke, one of two Cuban members (the other being Armando Codina, a Miami entrepreneur and member of the advisory board of the Southeast First National Bank) of The Non-Group, an unofficial and extremely private organization which had been called the shadow government of South Florida,” the late Joan Didion wrote in 1987 for The New York Review.
In 1992, The Washington Post reported a split among Cuban exiles in Miami. A $150,000 sculpture by Julio Larraz, a Cuban-American artist, depicting a giant bitten watermelon slice and Miami-Dade Housing Agency funds prompted years of legal trouble for Masvidal in 2007 until the case was dismissed in 2014.
Records show Masvidal Partners, a real estate development firm, was based in Coral Gables where family and friends plan to say goodbye at 10 a.m., on Thursday, at the Church of the Little Flower. The inurnment is set to be at the Caballero Rivero Woodlawn North in Little Havana.