In 1960, Cuba regained its piers, sugar, and electricity from its American owners. In May of this year, Washington moved to take them back. He prosecuted Raul Castro for the 1996 downing of Brothers to the Rescue, sailed the aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, and won Supreme Court support for claims for confiscated property. None of this is improvised. While this development, like much of the current spectacle of the U.S. administration, appears chaotic, its impact is anything but.
Behind this convergence lies an old machine. The U.S. embargo, which began under the Eisenhower administration and was tightened under the Kennedy administration, is older than most Cubans living today. The Helms-Burton Act, a U.S. law enacted in 1996, allows Americans to sue companies that use property confiscated from Americans by Cuba, whether in port, navigation or construction. These Americans were primarily Creoles who became American corporations and American émigrés. The Foreign Claims Settlement Board maintains 5,913 certified claims since the 1960s, representing $1.9 billion in principal and approximately $9 billion in interest. I’m waiting. What’s new is not the design, but the speed of shooting and reshooting.
The pace of recapture has recently accelerated, with U.S. forces capturing Venezuela’s president in a pre-dawn raid on Caracas on January 3, 2026, and killing 32 Cuban officers in the same operation. The attack cut off Venezuelan oil, one of Cuba’s lifelines. Mexico moved to fill the gap, but halted shipments within weeks after the U.S. government threatened to impose tariffs on countries supplying Cuba. By May, parts of Havana were experiencing up to 20 hours of darkness a day. Currently, President Trump has said that once Iran is resolved, Cuba will be the next target for regime change imposed by the United States.
“We are dying as we live,” a Cuban television director said last week. Still, the burden of the lockdown is uneven. The research I began in Cuba in 1998, which later became Venceremos?, revealed who would absorb the worst shocks when the economy collapses and the power grid goes down. It’s not the families sending money back from Miami or the elites waiting to get their property back. Engineered starvation creates its own politics, and blockades create demands for “rescue.” When Havana’s demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos Espineira calls for “international humanitarian intervention” or even “intervention forces” to “protect the population from violence,” he is speaking from within the emergency, not calling for a U.S. invasion. But relief without enforcement is an option Washington and Miami have consistently rejected.
Instead, on May 20, Cuba’s Independence Day, the Justice Department indicted Raul Castro, 94, for shooting down two asylum planes in 1996. The indictment names the former head of state 30 years after the fact, and Washington chose Miami’s Freedom Tower, the symbolic door for Cuban exiles since the 1960s, as the location for its announcement. In response to a question about extradition, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Mr. Castro would come of his own accord or by other means. This template is well known. Lumumba, Bishop, Aristide…the other one was just used for Maduro in Caracas.
Although the shootout that led to the latest charges occurred in 1996, the older complaint itself has jurisdiction. For 60 years, Cuba has denied one thing the indictment alleges: that American courts can intervene in Cuba. It sheltered black liberation activists wanted by Washington, such as Nehanda Abiodun and Assata Shakur, and met every demand and reward for their return with silence. It wasn’t just property that Washington wanted back. It’s a submission from a state that has spent two generations denying that U.S. law has any influence on the island.
The day after the indictment, the U.S. Supreme Court enacted the Retrial Act. In Havana Docks Corporation v. Royal Caribbean Cruises, eight judges ruled that the cruise line that used Havana’s ports from 2016 to 2019 trafficked in confiscated property, and remanded the case for further proceedings over unpaid amounts. Justice Thomas wrote the majority. Justice Kagan dissented alone. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kavanaugh, agreed. However, she warned that this could allow the collection of potentially unlimited amounts of money from a potentially unlimited number of people.
The pursuit of recovery has an underlying racial structure. Who owned property that could be nationalized by the revolution in Cuba in 1959? U.S. companies and Cuba’s Creole class. By 1960, U.S. companies owned or controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s electricity generation, telephone system, and most of its mines and sugar. The recognized claims of the Commission for the Settlement of Foreign Claims reflected the racial class structure of pre-revolutionary capital. Beyond them lies a larger world of deeds and titles held by structurally white Creole exile communities. Florida’s Cuban American Congressional Delegation, which includes Rubio, Díaz-Balart, Salazar and Jimenez, has made this their project, as the legislative arm of a district that has been waiting 66 years for a legal structure. Black Cubans used unfree or semi-free labor to build the wharves, sugar mills, and now-litigated ports, but they have no recognized claim to the property they created.
In my book Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba, I trace this racial geography through Cuba’s tourism economy. From the pre-1959 entertainment colony to the post-Soviet special period when tourism returned and its burden became uneven again. From 2016 to 2019, the cruise economy was in its third rotation. The ruling allows a fourth “hui como ayer” to be protected by federal law today as it was yesterday.
American readers will recognize the court’s work in restoring the pre-civil rights racial economic order with the neutral language of property law. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) watered down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the corporate project of restoring Second Reconstruction civil rights gains has been steadily progressing ever since. Judge Thomas wrote the concurrence in Shelby County, and the majority in Havana Docks wrote the concurrence. That is the same as invalidating the effects of 20th century redistributive interventions by treating them as property violations or constitutional anomalies. Havana Docks is an international application.
Demographers called for international humanitarian intervention. But there is nothing “humane” about what is arriving. The aircraft carrier Nimitz and its strike group entered the Caribbean the day after the dock decision, and a few days later the commander of U.S. Southern Command met with Cuban generals on the edge of Guantanamo. The Caracas play is underway, but Venezuela is Venezuela and Cuba is Cuba. Cuba’s National Civil Defense General Staff is directing the family to fire. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel has warned of bloodshed with untold consequences and values Cuban blood as much as anyone else’s. This island is not going to stay silent.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
