US Supreme Court paves way for companies affected by Fidel Castro’s expropriations to seek compensation from Cuba

A new twist in the tensions between the United States and Cuba. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in favor of a U.S. company whose docks were confiscated by the Castro regime in 1960 after Fidel Castro came to power. The court’s decision — in a case openly supported by U.S. President Donald Trump — opens the door to future claims by other U.S. firms and citizens affected during the wave of expropriations carried out in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

The ruling passed by a vote of eight to one. The company in question is Havana Docks Corporation. The decision comes amid the White House’s campaign to pressure Cuba, which is gripped by a severe economic and humanitarian crisis. It also comes one day after the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former president Raúl Castro (2008–2018) for his alleged role in the 1996 downing of two planes belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue organization, in which four people were killed.

In 1909, Havana Docks Corporation obtained a concession to operate docks in Cuban ports until 2004. The company argues that the post‑Revolution confiscation in 1959 violated an agreement under which the Havana government had committed to compensating the U.S. firm if it cancelled the concession before 2004.

The port company has been seeking compensation for decades — ever since Congress authorized such claims in the 1990s. In 2019, it secured a Miami court order requiring four cruise lines (Royal Caribbean Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, Carnival Corporation, and MSC Cruises) to pay $100 million each for using berths built in Havana’s port. Following that ruling, major cruise companies stopped organizing leisure cruises with stops in Cuba.

That decision was appealed: the cruise lines argued that Havana Docks’ operating rights would have expired in any case in 2004, long before they used the facilities between 2016 and 2019. A federal appeals court in Atlanta agreed. The case reached the Supreme Court, which issued its ruling on Thursday.

Thursday’s ruling returns to the original interpretation and states that the 1996 Helms‑Burton Act makes clear that claims over confiscated property are not limited to whatever contractual interest a claimant once held. Instead, the law allows those claims to extend to the physical property itself, as long as the claimant had an ownership stake when the Cuban government took control of it after January 1, 1959. That reading effectively nullifies the cruise lines’ argument that Havana Docks’ concession had already expired. Under Title III, any U.S. citizen or legal entity — including Cuban‑born individuals who later became U.S. nationals — is considered to hold a valid claim to property seized by the Cuban state at any point since 1959.

The Trump administration supported Havana Docks’ claims and argued that lawsuits seeking compensation were a useful foreign‑policy tool to deter international companies from investing in Cuba.

In the Supreme Court ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas writes: “The Act generally makes those who use property tainted by a past confiscation liable to any United States national who owns a claim to that property.”

Justice Elena Kagan, the sole dissenter, argued that the docks never ceased to be Cuban government property and that Havana Docks’ interest had expired even before international cruise lines began using them.

Thomas contends that “Havana Docks has shown that the cruise lines used confiscated property in which Havana Docks had a property interest and to which it owns a claim [...] Havana Docks established that the Cuban government confiscated those docks without compensation when Castro’s forces physically took possession of the docks and expelled Havana Docks’ agents in 1960.”

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