A half-century after Bobby Fuller was executed by a Castro firing squad, his aging siblings are ratcheting up their quest to make Cuba pay for their enduring loss.

And they have come up with a new legal strategy for doing so: Make U.S. phone companies cough up the money.

Specifically, they want to attach the hundreds of millions in revenue that phone carriers like AT&T and Sprint share with the Cuban phone monopoly. The money is generated by calls between the island and the United States, an enterprise exempted from the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

If successful, the relatives of Fuller and four other Miami-Dade families with more than $1 billion in outstanding ``wrongful death'' judgments against Cuba would have a potential new source from which to collect their claims.

``The stakes are huge,'' said Miami attorney Andrew Hall, who recently collected a $13 million judgment against Sudan for families of 17 U.S. sailors killed in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole. Hall is not involved in the Fullers' case.

The Fuller family's legal action also could expose closely held details of how the U.S.-licensed phone companies go through third parties to pay the Castro government -- secrets they don't want to disclose.

The phone companies have launched a defense, saying their payments cannot be seized to satisfy the judgments because the money cannot be directly linked to the Cuban government.

In the first six months of 2008, the latest figures available, eight major phone companies, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, paid about $122.5 million to Cuba or other carriers that provide long-distance service to the island, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

The Fuller family's legal strategy is born of necessity because Cuban assets frozen in U.S. banks since 1963 have been mostly tapped out to pay for past wrongful-death judgments against the Castro government.

A half-dozen families -- including relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by the Cuban Air Force in 1996 -- have depleted the Cuban accounts at JP Morgan Chase in New York that once totaled about $170 million.

Coral Gables attorney Roberto Martinez, who led the successful legal team in the Brothers to the Rescue case, now represents the Fuller family in trying to open a new pipeline into Cuban assets held in the United States.

Martinez has already gotten AT&T to pay $1 million to the four living siblings of Fuller and his late daughter's family -- money AT&T owed for years to Cuba's original phone company, EMTELCUBA, now defunct. That payout represented a fraction of the Fullers' $100 million judgment against Cuba, awarded in December 2006.

Martinez also has persuaded a federal judge to order nine telephone companies with U.S. licenses -- including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint -- to explain how they pay long-distance revenue to the Cuban government.

The companies hold licenses from the Treasury Department to provide the phone service between the island nation and the United States.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan ordered the phone companies to submit affidavits disclosing their payments to third-party carriers and to Cuba's national phone company, Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. Known as ETECSA, it succeeded EMTELCUBA in 1994 and operates about 650,000 fixed-line phones.

Legally, the companies' payments to Cuba could be attached only if transferred to an ``agency or instrumentality'' of the Cuban government. Martinez asserts ETECSA fits that definition, calling it ``Havana's state-run telecommunications monopoly'' in a court filing.

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