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The secret negotiations between Washington and Havana have brought to the forefront, for the first time in decades, the real possibility of compensations for the properties that the Cuban regime confiscated following the 1959 Revolution, a historical conflict currently valued at over 9 billion dollars, reported the agency AP.
The delegation sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which landed in Havana on April 10 on the first U.S. government plane to touch down on the island since 2016, explicitly raised the discussion of compensations for properties expropriated from American citizens, according to the Miami Herald.
Behind the figures, there are family stories that exile has been carrying for more than six decades.
Raúl Valdés-Fauli, lawyer and former mayor of Coral Gables, recalls the day in November 1960 when an armed revolutionary agent burst into his family's Banco Pedroso in Havana, expelled his father and uncle calling them "worms," and did not allow them to take even the family photos. The bank had been in the family since the 16th century.
The magnitude of the problem is enormous. The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States Department of Justice certified approximately 5,913 claims worth an original amount of 1.9 billion dollars between 1964 and 1972, a figure that, with accumulated interest, today exceeds 9 billion according to estimates from Bloomberg.
The ten largest claims —including Cuban Electric Company, five sugar companies, ITT, ExxonMobil, and Starwood Hotels— total nearly 960 million dollars.
In addition to those figures, there are between 200,000 and 300,000 additional claims from Cuban Americans who were Cuban nationals at the time of the expropriations and are not included in the 5,913 certified claims.
The legal framework to demand compensation exists and has already resulted in million-dollar verdicts.
The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, whose Title III was fully activated in 2019 allows lawsuits against companies operating with confiscated properties in Cuba.
In April 2025, a jury in Miami ordered Expedia to pay 29.8 million dollars to the grandson of the owners of Cayo Coco. In 2023, a court upheld a judgment of 2.79 billion dollars against Cuba in favor of the Villoldo family.
The Supreme Court of the United States also has a pending ruling on the application of Title III, expected before June 2026, which could redefine how these assets are claimed. Analysts point out that the Cuban regime has a short window of time to implement reforms if it wants to make progress in these negotiations.
In the political arena, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, was unequivocal on March 19: "At the very least, this must happen".
However, voices from the exile community, cited by Univisión, warn that anything that comes from the regime should be viewed with a significant dose of skepticism.
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