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Carlos R. Fernández de Cossío, Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, posted on Facebook a statement in which he directly blames the United States government for the failure of former American owners to receive compensation for the Cuban nationalizations of the 1960s.
The official asserts that the expropriations "were absolutely legitimate, in accordance with the Cuban Constitution of 1940, national laws, and the practices of International Law," and that Cuba offered compensation formulas to all affected countries, reaching agreements with Canada, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Switzerland.
According to Fernández de Cossío, Washington was the only one that refused to negotiate: "The U.S. government rejected the compensation proposal and even refused to sit down to seek a mutually acceptable formula through negotiation."
The deputy minister justifies that refusal with a political argument: at that time, the U.S. "was secretly planning the violent overthrow of the revolutionary government and training a group of mercenaries to invade the country," referring to the Playa Girón invasion of April 1961.
After the defeat of that invasion, he claims, Cuba insisted on resuming negotiations, but Washington did not respond: "If the former American owners were not compensated, it was because their government played politically and hostilely with the issue."
The central argument of the official inverts the logic of the claim: it asserts that the damage caused by the U.S. to Cuba—through the embargo, military aggression, terrorism, and economic sabotage—is "far greater than what the former owners could have experienced due to the actions of their government."
This statement comes at a time when the debate on mutual compensation between Cuba and the U.S. has gained renewed relevance in 2026, with the Trump administration maintaining a maximum pressure policy on Havana.
In March, Fernández de Cossío himself proposed a global compensation agreement contingent upon a bilateral normalization process that includes the lifting of the embargo, in an interview with Drop Site News.
The U.S. Claims Commission has certified nearly 6,000 claims with an original value of 1.9 billion dollars, which, with annual interest of 6%, would exceed 9 billion today, according to data from the research dossier.
Cuba, for its part, estimates the damages from the embargo to be over 144 billion dollars up to 2022, and the MINREX has submitted a total claim of 188.612 billion dollars to the UN for the expropriation of Cuban properties in the U.S. and damages from the embargo.
The deputy minister insists that any negotiation must be reciprocal: "For years, Cuba has expressed its willingness to sit down and discuss the issue of mutual claims and compensations, with each party's demands on the same table."
The stance of the Cuban regime, reiterated in multiple bilateral forums since the diplomatic thaw of 2015, links any compensation to American owners to the lifting of the embargo and the recognition of Cuban claims, a condition that Washington has systematically rejected.
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