The US Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Exxon Mobil can sue Cuban state-owned companies in American courts for more than $1 billion over an oil refinery, terminals, and hundreds of service stations that Cuba nationalized after its 1959 revolution, handing Washington a fresh weapon against the island it has blockaded for decades.
The 6-3 decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act strips Cuban state enterprises of the sovereign immunity that normally shields foreign governments from US lawsuits. The court’s three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Elena Kagan writing that the law contains no such provision.
Helms-Burton is the 1996 law that codified the decades-old US embargo of Cuba into statute, stripping any president of the power to lift it alone. Its Title III provision lets US nationals sue over property the Cuban government reclaimed from foreign corporations after the revolution, and sue all companies that later do business using those assets. The provision was considered so aggressive, and so likely to anger allies whose firms invest in Cuba and to poison any future US-Cuba settlement, that every president continued to suspend it in six-month incremental waivers for over two decades, until Trump let the suspension lapse in 2019. Exxon sued the same day.
The ruling lands as Trump tightens the screws on Havana, which is already reeling under a renewed US oil blockade that has caused brutal shortages and hardship across the island. Together with a similar decision last month (Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises), it opens the door to thousands of pending claims, nearly 6,000 certified ones worth almost $2 billion before interest, seeking to extract wealth from a nation the US has worked to isolate since Cubans first took control of their own resources in 1960.
(Based on information from the Supreme Court ruling and reporting by the AP, CNN, and Bloomberg Law.)
📸 Photo: March 12, 1996, President Clinton signs the bill into law.
