The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday 23 June that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act strips sovereign immunity from agencies and instrumentalities of the Cuban government, clearing US federal courts to hear "trafficking" suits against foreign firms that operate on property confiscated after the 1959 revolution1. The Spanish hotel groups Meliá and Iberostar, which run resorts on expropriated land, are named as directly exposed.
Title III of the Act gives Cuban-American families whose land was seized a private right to sue in US court; the ruling removes the sovereign-immunity defence that Cuban state entities, and by extension their foreign partners, could once stand behind. Presidents waived Title III for more than two decades after 1996, and suits became possible only when the waiver first lifted in 2019. This decision goes further, stripping the immunity shield that survived even after that waiver lifted.
The ruling came from the judiciary on its own docket, not from Treasury. Two separate US institutions closed two separate channels in the same week, with no coordination shown between them: OFAC blocked transactions on 23 June while the Court removed an immunity shield the same day. Meliá had already begun ending management contracts on its Cuban hotels, and Iberostar and other chains pulled out of GAESA-run resorts before the 5 June wind-down deadline; the decision raises the litigation cost of any Cuba footprint they have kept.
