The Supreme Court has reopened a legal path that Cuba’s communist government and its foreign business partners hoped had been buried by time.
In an 8-1 decision, the court ruled that Havana Docks Corp. may continue pursuing claims against cruise lines that used port facilities in Havana that were seized by Fidel Castro’s government more than six decades ago. The case targets Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian and MSC, which brought tourists to Cuba during the short-lived Obama-era thaw in relations.
The ruling does not end the litigation. But it gives new force to a simple moral proposition: property stolen by a dictatorship does not become clean merely because enough years have passed or because foreign companies later found a way to profit from it.
The dispute centers on the Helms-Burton Act, a 1996 law that allows U.S. nationals with claims to property confiscated by the Cuban government to sue companies that “traffic” in that property. For years, presidents of both parties suspended the provision allowing such suits, largely to avoid conflicts with allies and companies doing business in Cuba. President Donald Trump ended that suspension in 2019, opening the door to lawsuits against firms that used confiscated assets.
Havana Docks had built and operated dock facilities in the Port of Havana before the Castro regime took control of the property in 1960 without compensation. The cruise lines later used the same port infrastructure from 2016 to 2019, carrying nearly a million passengers into Havana as Washington briefly encouraged more travel to the island.
The cruise companies argued that Havana Docks’ original concession would have expired in 2004 even if the property had never been seized, and therefore the company could not sue over later use of the docks. A federal appeals court accepted that logic. The Supreme Court rejected it, holding that the relevant point was the use of confiscated property to which Havana Docks owns a claim.
That matters far beyond one pier.
Cuba’s tourism industry has long been built on a contradiction. Foreign visitors are sold beaches, music, rum and nostalgia, while many of the underlying assets sit inside a state-controlled economy shaped by confiscation, repression and military-linked enterprises. Hotels, ports and tourism infrastructure did not emerge from a normal private market. Much of it rests on property taken by force and then repurposed to earn hard currency for the same system that dispossessed its owners and impoverished ordinary Cubans.
The ruling is therefore not merely a win for one company. It is a warning to the tourist industry: doing business with confiscated Cuban property carries legal and moral risk.
Supporters of engagement with Cuba often argue that tourism helps the Cuban people. In theory, it could. In practice, too much of the money has flowed through state and military channels, while Cuban workers remain underpaid, overcontrolled and politically voiceless. The regime markets the island’s beauty while denying its people the rights that make prosperity durable: property rights, free enterprise, free speech and political accountability.
The Cuban people are not the enemy of this ruling. They are the reason it matters.
A future Cuba will need investment, tourism and foreign partners. But it will also need justice. That means recognizing that the revolution’s great theft was not only the seizure of land, docks, homes and businesses. It was the seizure of a country’s future by a ruling class that claimed to speak for the people while stripping them of ownership, opportunity and exit.
The Supreme Court has not solved that history. But it has made one thing harder: pretending that confiscated property is just another business opportunity.
Simons Chase writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
