As President Donald Trump gestures toward regime change in Cuba, the US Supreme Court, with Trump’s urging, has agreed to hear lawsuits that could help corporate interests recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in long-expropriated Cuban assets if the United States seizes control of the nation.
One of those lawsuits involves an oil giant claiming damages from Cuban companies for decades-old revolutionary asset seizures. The other, which one of the plaintiffs calls the most important Supreme Court case on Cuba “in the past sixty years,” involves the scion of a fascist-friendly corporate empire who’s taken credit for Trump’s hardline stance on Cuba and is seeking compensation for a 122-year-old expired pier contract.
Together, they build on long-dormant anti-Cuban foreign policy weaponized by Trump and push the court to extend US law beyond its borders to retroactively punish a foreign revolution — and deliver the spoils to profiteers.
“The Supreme Court is doing about seventy cases a year,” Robert Muse, a Washington, DC–based attorney who has long focused on Cuban legal matters, told the Lever. “The fact that it would devote two places on the docket to litigation arising under a statute that’s only produced about fifty cases in total — and where there’s no circuit split — is extraordinary.”
Over the past year, the Trump administration has ratcheted up tactics to deliver regime change in Cuba, which has weathered a comprehensive trade embargo for six decades and has been trapped in fuel, energy, medicine, and foreign exchange crises since the onset of COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, within hours of US troops extracting Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, Donald Trump asserted that “Cuba is ready to fall” because Cuba gets “all of their income” from Venezuelan oil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a prominent Cuban American politician, soon echoed the warning, telling the Cuban government that it “should be…
Auteur: Blake Burdge
