An empty chair is not neutral furniture in a courtroom.
It means someone has not come to answer. It means papers may still be stacked, arguments may still exist somewhere in the world, and a flag may still fly over the absent party’s capital, but the chair remains empty. The room proceeds without it.
That is the image now trailing Cuba through London.
PCB Byrne, the British firm representing the Banco Nacional de Cuba and the Republic of Cuba in their long debt litigation, has stopped acting for them. Bloomberg reported that the firm withdrew after going more than a year without payment; PCB Byrne confirmed only that it no longer represents the bank or the Cuban state. The withdrawal leaves Havana and its old national bank exposed in proceedings concerning debts that have outlived the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, the Obama opening and the brief expectation that Cuba might one day become financially legible again. (Bloomberg, August 28, 2026, via reporter Irene García Pérez’s public post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/irene-garc%C3%ADa-p%C3%A9rez-9b38157acubas-lawyers-quit-uk-case-after-going-unpaid-activity-7500963812037177344-9x6q; 14ymedio: https://www.14ymedio.com/cuba/abogados-cuba-litigio-crf-abandonaron1_1130793.html) (linkedin.com)
The chair is empty because Cuba has run out of lawyers. But the larger fact is that it has spent decades running from the table.
The immediate case concerns CRF I Limited, a fund that holds claims tied to loans made to the Banco Nacional de Cuba in the 1980s. In 2023, London’s Commercial Court found that CRF was a lawful creditor of the Banco Nacional, though not of the Republic itself. The Court of Appeal later dismissed the bank’s appeal, and the United Kingdom Supreme Court declined to hear a further challenge in March 2025. The legal route did not close with a revolutionary flourish. It narrowed, slowly and expensively, into a corridor with fewer doors. (High Court judgment, CRF I Ltd v Banco Nacional de Cuba, 2023: https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/sites/horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/files/content/High%20Court%20of%20UK%20Cuban%20Debt.pdf; Bloomberg Línea: https://www.bloomberglinea.com/2023/04/04/corte-britanica-dice-que-crf-si-es-acreedor-legitimo-del-banco-nacional-de-cuba/) (horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu)
Then came the most revealing small failure. In July, the Commercial Court entered a default judgment against the Banco Nacional after it did not answer the assessment of damages. CRF says the judgment and costs total £18.1 million. That figure is not the whole debt story. It is only the sound of one lock turning. (CRF I Limited statement, reproduced by the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council: https://www.cubatrade.org/blog?offset=1785686130825) (cubatrade.org)
Cuba is accustomed to speaking of sovereignty as if it were a wall: tall, permanent, and self-supporting. But sovereignty also has invoices. It has court deadlines. It has the dull, humiliating mechanics of retaining counsel and responding to correspondence. A state cannot declare itself independent of arithmetic merely by describing its creditors as hostile.
That is the bitter comedy of the empty chair. The revolution that made a religion of refusing foreign tutelage is now confronted by an old foreign debt in a foreign court, with no lawyer seated at the table to dispute its terms.
There is, of course, a serious argument for Cuba’s caution. Sovereign debt is rarely innocent history. The claims at issue originate in a period when the island borrowed through European banks under a system that collapsed into arrears and political rupture. Distressed-debt funds do not arrive with humanitarian intentions. They buy claims because they expect leverage, litigation or eventual recovery. A poor country facing fuel shortages, sanctions risk, a shredded currency and failing public services can reasonably fear that paying old creditors today means taking food, medicine or electricity from people who had no hand in contracting the loans forty years ago.
Washington’s pressure makes the accounting harder, not easier. Sanctions and compliance fear reduce Cuba’s room to borrow, transfer money, attract capital and make normal commercial arrangements. The island’s crisis cannot be reduced to one government’s failures because the United States has spent years ensuring that failure carries a higher price.
That case deserves to be heard. It does not excuse Havana’s answer.
The regime has not developed a disciplined strategy for debt, reform or trust. It has developed postponement. It delays the bill, denounces the bill, rearranges the office responsible for the bill, and finally discovers that the lawyer handling the bill has become another unpaid creditor. This is not defiance. It is administrative self-harm elevated into a national method.
CRF says it wrote directly to Miguel Díaz-Canel on June 22 with proposals that included growth-linked instruments and debt-for-equity structures intended to preserve Cuba’s immediate liquidity. Havana did not publicly answer. Perhaps the offer was inadequate. Perhaps accepting a conversation with a creditor fund would have carried political costs. But silence is not a restructuring plan. It is simply an empty chair before the hearing begins. (CRF I Limited statement, reproduced by the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council: https://www.cubatrade.org/blog?offset=1785686130825) (cubatrade.org)
The real damage is larger than any particular ruling. Countries return to financial markets not because bankers become sentimental, but because creditors, insurers, suppliers and investors begin to believe that agreements will survive politics. Cuba wants foreign investment. It wants hard currency. It wants private enterprise to bring in goods, produce food and keep fragments of the economy moving. Yet every unpaid obligation tells the next prospective partner that the system may welcome capital at the airport and abandon it in the corridor.
The 2015-to-2017 opening briefly suggested a different possibility. Cuba settled debts with the Paris Club in 2015. Embassies reopened. Investors and entrepreneurs saw a chance, however incomplete, that the island might exchange its old posture of siege for something more practical: connection, rules, negotiation, risk. That window was never wide enough to make Cuba free. But it was real. And it has closed. (High Court judgment, CRF I Ltd v Banco Nacional de Cuba, 2023: https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/sites/horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/files/content/High%20Court%20of%20UK%20Cuban%20Debt.pdf) (horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu)
It cannot be reopened by nostalgia. Nor can it be reopened by announcing reforms while treating the obligations created by the old system as somebody else’s problem.
Cuba’s rulers will say the country cannot pay. On the narrowest point, they may be right. The island is poor, constrained and in no condition for a grand gesture of financial purification. But inability to pay is not the same as inability to negotiate. A government can say what it owes, what it disputes, what it can offer and when. It can send a representative. It can keep a lawyer.
Instead, the system has chosen the oldest Cuban statecraft of all: preserve the pose, defer the cost, and hope the room empties before the reckoning arrives.
But courts do not work that way. The clerk calls the case. The claimant rises. The judge looks across the room.
And Cuba’s chair is empty.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Dispatches.
