With supporting briefs filed by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, the Exxon Mobil and Havana Docks bosses took cases before the U.S. Supreme Court Feb. 23, seeking millions of dollars for property nationalized by the Cuban government — with massive popular support — in 1960.
Exxon Mobil claims more than $1 billion from the Cuban government. Exxon, then Standard Oil, refined oil and operated gas stations throughout Cuba before 1960. Havana Docks, which ran port facilities prior to the revolution, wants $440 million from four cruise lines — Royal Caribbean Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, Carnival Corporation and MSC Cruises — for use of the docks between 2016 and 2019, even though the 100-year sweetheart deal they signed with the U.S.-controlled Cuban government had run out.
Decisions on both cases are expected by summer.
The Helms-Burton Act, signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, intensified the U.S. rulers’ brutal economic war against Cuba first put into place by the John F. Kennedy administration. The Supreme Court is being asked to uphold compensation under Title III of the act, which allows U.S. citizens to sue not only Cuban individuals and companies, but any company said to profit from the use of nationalized property on the island.
The aim is to weaken Cuba with large financial losses. And to set a precedent to open the flood gates of additional moves to try to bankrupt Cuba.
The U.S. ruling class — under Democratic and Republican administrations alike — has never forgiven the working people of Cuba for overthrowing the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista regime in 1959. Nor for taking control of the means of production after 60 years of colonial domination.
Title III was suspended by the administrations in Washington until 2019 when the first Trump administration endorsed its use, opening the door to some 40 rapacious cases now moving through the court system.
A bipartisan group of six members of Congress filed a brief to press the Supreme Court to uphold the use of Title III. The cruise lines paid tens of millions of dollars to the Cuban regime, they argue, a course of action that “undermines our nation’s foreign policy on Cuba.”
Aimee Brown, an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, urged the justices to uphold the case “to impose harsh economic pressure on the Cuban government.”
The Cuban companies, represented by Michael R. Krinsky and Jules Lobel, said they were immune under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which bars lawsuits in U.S. courts against foreign governments. This presumption of immunity, Lobel told the court, was not rescinded by the Helms-Burton Act and should be upheld.
Before the Cuban Revolution, U.S. companies owned or controlled 90% of the island’s electric industry, its telephone system, much of its mining, sugarcane fields, its oil refineries and warehouses. Trade between Cuba and the U.S. between 1950 and 1960 put more than $1 billion into the pockets of U.S. bosses while half of Cuban working people had no access to electricity and more than half lived in huts, shacks and in slums, without sanitary facilities.
But after the overthrow of Batista, U.S. economic aggression against Cuba mounted in 1960, and working people took to the streets. Cuba’s revolutionary government responded to their initiative, nationalizing major U.S. companies.
Fidel Castro told the U.N. General Assembly in September 1960 that after the nationalizations, Cuba offered compensation payable over 20 years, with interest. Washington refused.