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 trained with other Cubans in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox.
Masvidal also served in the CIA on logistics when he was a University of Miami student, and he worked at the former Everglades Hotel in valet parking at 244 Biscayne Boulevard, in downtown Miami.
He was a self-made man. The son of a physician in Havana, moved to Miami as a teenager after Fidel Castro took power. Masvidal became a vice president at Citibank and lived 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 original members of the Cuban American National Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1981.
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. He continued his activism after the election.
“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,” 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 depicting a giant watermelon 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 he lived for decades and where family and friends plan to say goodbye at 10 a.m., on Thursday, at the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables. The inurnment will be at the Caballero Rivero Woodlawn North.
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