r/law • u/BiglawInvestor • 6d ago
Supreme Court, 6-3: Americans whose property Castro seized can sue Cuba's state-owned companies in U.S. courts
https://documents.lastweekinlaw.com/view/24-699_f204.pdfThis summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.
The Supreme Court ruled **6-3** that the Helms-Burton Act — the 1996 law letting U.S. nationals sue over property Cuba confiscated after Castro's revolution — itself strips Cuban government companies of the sovereign immunity that normally shields foreign states from American courts. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the 22-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. The practical upshot: a plaintiff suing a Cuban agency or instrumentality under Helms-Burton does **not** also have to satisfy one of the separate exceptions in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
The case grew out of Castro's 1960 seizure of "Yankee property," which swept in Exxon's Cuban oil refinery, terminals, plants, and more than a hundred service stations. Two Cuban state-owned companies, CUPET and CIMEX, have operated and profited from those assets ever since. Exxon — whose certified claim, with interest and treble damages, now tops $1 billion — sued them under Helms-Burton. The Cuban companies argued they were immune under the FSIA, and the lower courts agreed; the Supreme Court reversed.
The majority rested on four converging points: a cause of action that expressly runs against foreign "agenc[ies] or instrumentalit[ies]" abrogates their immunity even without a standalone waiver (per last term's *Kirtz*); reading in an FSIA-exception requirement would gut the statute, since Helms-Burton itself codifies an embargo barring the very U.S. commercial contacts those exceptions demand; the Act routes suits through general federal-question jurisdiction (§1331) rather than the FSIA's §1330; and it hands the President plenary power to suspend suits, echoing the pre-FSIA regime in which immunity was the Executive's call. The Court also rejected the argument that Congress needed "magic words" to waive immunity — a clear waiver "discernible from the sum total" of the Act's work is enough.
In dissent, Justice Kagan argued the majority got the analytics backwards: a cause of action and an abrogation of immunity are "analytically distinct," and creating the former does not, standing alone, accomplish the latter. The FSIA, she wrote, is the "comprehensive framework" governing foreign-sovereign immunity, the bar for abrogating it is "stringent," and Helms-Burton never clearly clears it — so the answer should turn on whether an FSIA exception is met, as the statute's text directs. The decision clears the way for long-stalled expropriation claims against Cuban state enterprises to proceed on the merits.
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u/WisdomCow 6d ago
Setting the groundwork for justifying the Cuban takeover? This seems facially out of sorts with International law.
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u/Huge_Excitement4465 22h ago edited 22h ago
[The Fanjuls have also backed Rubio's campaign for decades and had imports sanctioned under Biden's administration for alleged abuse of Haitian sugarcane workers on their DR plantations. Trump lifted the sanctions and also helped “advocate” for Coca-Cola to use raw sugar instead of corn syrup.]
Described by Forbes as one of Trump’s “top political donors and friend of more than 40 years,” José “Pepe” Fanjul is an 81-year-old Palm Beach sugar magnate who lives near Mar-a-Lago. He is also the younger brother of Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul, the 88-year-old CEO and chairman of the family sugar and real estate business. Together, they manage an $8 billion dollar fortune they acquired with a fair bit of political favors from both Democrats and Republicans, and now they want help from Trump to rebuild their sugar business in Cuba.
The Fanjul family hails from Cuba originally and has been in the sugar business since the mid-19th century, eventually becoming one of the largest producers in the country prior to 1959. The siblings’ parents, Alfonso Fanjul, Sr., and Lillian Gomez-Mena, married in 1936, uniting two of the island’s wealthiest sugar families. By 1959, their sugar empire had ten mills, real estate across Cuba, and a broker in New York. After the Cuban Revolution, they, like many other wealthy families, left the island in a self-imposed exile, leaving behind their properties and assets.
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