The summons is, technically, a piece of paper. It travels by certified mail, through the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, addressed to Corporación Cimex — a Cuban state-owned conglomerate that operates, among other things, a chain of service stations and foreign-currency stores across the island. The summons instructs Cimex to appear and answer for property confiscated in 1960: refineries, gas stations, depots, packaging plants, the physical infrastructure of the Cuban petroleum industry. The plaintiff is Exxon Mobil. The amount at stake is more than a billion dollars. And the irony that wire copy has mostly treated as a footnote is this: the Cuban government seized that infrastructure in 1960 because, during an earlier American oil embargo, the refineries stopped receiving the crude they needed to function. Cuba took the machinery. Now it owes for the machinery. And the machinery still has no crude.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Exxon Mobil can sue the Cuban government over the seized property, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for the majority that state-owned companies cannot hide behind sovereign immunity to escape litigation.
The case is Exxon Mobil v. Corporación Cimex, and the ruling allows a lawsuit over assets confiscated from Exxon's predecessor to proceed in federal court.
It was the second ruling in as many months in favor of U.S. owners of Cuban property confiscated by the communist government more than sixty-five years ago. The first, decided in May, revived claims by the American company that had operated the docks at Havana Harbor against cruise lines that brought tourists through those piers during the Obama thaw. Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian, and MSC were each found liable for using a port confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960, with the Supreme Court concluding that federal law allows the original concessionaire to sue them for commercial use of the facility during the 2016-to-2019 period.
The two rulings share a legal spine: the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, passed by Congress in response to Cuba's shootdown of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exile pilots, and amended to include a private right of action that every president from Clinton through Obama suspended, on the argument that activating it would poison any prospect of a negotiated settlement and antagonize allies doing business on the island. Before the first Trump administration, every president had suspended the provision because of objections from U.S. allies doing business in Cuba and the effect on future negotiated settlements; Trump lifted the suspension in 2019, and Exxon filed its lawsuit the same day. Now, six years and one Supreme Court term later, the legal architecture is complete. The wall of sovereign immunity that shielded Cuban state companies from American courts has been removed, brick by brick, by the same court that also happens to be deciding, this term, whether Trump's emergency powers extend to the oil blockade strangling the island. The Cuban government is fighting a siege in the present and a lawsuit from the past simultaneously, and it is losing both.
The U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission valued Exxon's Cuban property in 1969 at $71.6 million, with 6 percent annual interest accruing from 1960 — a sum that Kavanaugh noted would exceed $1 billion today.
In addition, the commission found that nearly 6,000 individual Americans and businesses held certified claims worth $1.9 billion, before adding interest or treble damages. The total liability exposure, compounded across six decades and multiplied under Helms-Burton's punitive provisions, runs into figures that dwarf Cuba's entire GDP. The bill does not ask whether Cuba can pay. It simply arrives.
What makes the historical loop so vertiginous is the sequence of causation. The Cuban government nationalized the Esso and Texaco refineries in 1960 not as an act of revolutionary ideology alone but as a response to an act of commercial warfare: the Eisenhower administration had pressured those same companies to refuse to refine Soviet crude that Cuba, already facing the tightening U.S. trade embargo, had begun to import. The refineries stopped processing oil. Cuba expropriated the refineries. And now, sixty-six years later, the island is again cut off from oil — the Cuban Ministry of Energy and Mines warned in May 2026 that the country had run out of oil and diesel entirely — and the American courts are presenting a bill for the original seizure that the original embargo provoked. The refinery owes for its own confiscation. The logic is circular only if you believe history moves in a line.
Kavanaugh wrote that "it would make little sense for Congress to construct an elaborate statute authorizing suits against the Cuban government agencies and instrumentalities if, because of the FSIA, almost no suits could ever get through the courthouse door." That is the majority's framing: Congress built a door and intended for plaintiffs to walk through it. The dissent's framing, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, is that "nothing in the text or 'architecture' of the Helms-Burton Act suggests that Congress abrogated the sovereign immunity of these defendants — much less that it did so with the requisite unmistakable clarity." This is not a frivolous position. Sovereign immunity is a doctrine with weight for a reason: it is the legal principle that allows countries to talk to each other without every bilateral relationship collapsing into litigation. Every prior administration, Democratic and Republican alike, understood that activating Helms-Burton's Title III would turn the question of Cuba's future into a creditors' dispute before it could become a diplomatic one. The moment any post-regime government in Havana attempts to open negotiations with Washington about normalization, the first items on the agenda will not be political reforms or prisoner releases or press freedom. They will be certified claims, compounded interest, and treble damages. The bill will arrive before the diplomats do.
That is the counter-argument worth sitting with. A Cuba without its current government — the scenario the Trump administration is explicitly trying to engineer — will not inherit a clean slate. Suppose, as the Trump administration seems to think, the current Cuban government collapses and new leadership seeks normal relations with the United States. One side effect not heard enough about would be the ensuing lawsuits. Those whose property was taken after the 1959 revolution would seek recompense, and thanks to the accumulating Supreme Court rulings, there could be even more, as corporations seek recompense from each other. The legal mechanism the United States has constructed to punish the current regime will be inherited by whatever comes next. Cuba after communism will wake up already in default, its state companies already defendants, its most productive state enterprises already collateral in cases winding through U.S. district courts. The question of whether Helms-Burton is a tool for justice or a trap for the future is not abstract. It is the most important question no one is asking while the lights are out.
But the lights being out is itself the argument. The regime that seized the refineries failed to run them. Only forty-four of Havana's one hundred and six rubbish trucks have been able to keep operating due to fuel shortages, as waste piles up on the city's street corners. The Corporación Cimex that must now answer to an American court is the same Cimex whose foreign-currency gas stations have sat largely inoperable because there is no fuel to dispense. The state companies that Cuba claimed sovereignty over in 1960 — that the revolution insisted it needed and could run better — are defendants in a billion-dollar lawsuit and simultaneously incapable of functioning as the businesses they seized. This is the 2015-to-2017 opening's most lasting epitaph: that brief window, when foreign capital and tourism receipts might have begun to rebuild the infrastructure and give the state companies something to defend, closed because the regime could not accept the political cost of the economic logic. The window shut, and the bill came due. The people who might have helped Cuba pay the former are now the people presenting the latter.
The summons sits in a court docket in Washington, D.C. Across the water, the service stations it references stand largely dark, the refineries it cites are still — waiting, as they have waited since 1960, for oil that keeps not arriving, claimed first by one power and now pursued by another, instruments of a revolution that could neither supply them nor relinquish them, and now owes more than a billion dollars for the privilege of holding on.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
