The $9 billion issue at the heart of US-Cuba tensions
By Max Saltman, Gonzalo Zegarra, CNN
(CNN) — Despite his title, the president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba has never been to Cuba. Nor does he operate any sugar mills there.
“I grew up here in Miami,” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez told CNN. “My dad instilled this love of Cuba in me. When he died, he was amazed how much it had taken root.”
Gutiérrez, a lawyer and consultant, describes his late father as a “young millionaire” who fled Cuba after attempting to help anti-Castro rebels, leaving behind a tidy fortune in sugar mills, banks and other commercial ventures.
As president of the sugar mill owners’ association, Gutiérrez says he’s spent much of his career advocating for diaspora Cubans in the United States who wish to see the billions of dollars of assets left behind in Cuba returned to them.
These days, things are looking up. The 94-year-old former President Raúl Castro has been indicted by the US government, President Donald Trump has hinted that he’ll be “taking” Cuba soon and a fellow Miami native, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is at the helm of American diplomacy.
“I have over the years represented maybe a thousand Cuban families like my own,” Gutiérrez said. “We’ve been hopeful for many years, but we’ve never, never, never, never, never had a situation like this with so many factors at play that militate for a change in Cuba.”
One of those factors came into play a few days after Gutiérrez spoke with CNN. The Supreme Court released an 8-1 ruling allowing a lawsuit over property confiscated by the Cuban government to move forward.
Gutiérrez, who was not a plaintiff but had followed the case closely as it meandered through the US court system, said he was “thrilled” by the ruling. “It’s the culmination of decades of hard work,” he said.
Billions of dollars at stake
This central concern of Gutiérrez’s career is a through-line of US-Cuba relations: the thousands of claims by American citizens and corporations over property taken by Cuba’s communist government. Accounting for interest, the total estimated value is more than $9 billion, according to US government figures.
It’s “a fairly high-priority issue, one of the first to come up whenever both countries make contact,” economist Ricardo Torres of American University told CNN.
Cuba’s nationalization wave began soon after Fidel Castro’s rebels took control of the island in 1959. Rural Cuba was profoundly impoverished and underdeveloped before and during the Batista era, and land ownership was scant among the working poor. First came an agrarian reform program , which banned foreign land ownership and broke up large, privately-held estates and redistributed them to Cuba’s peasant class.
“At that time, there was a need for agrarian reform, for the nationalization of Cuba’s infrastructure,” said Lillian Guerra, director of the Cuba program at the University of Florida. “That huge project of putting the country’s resources in the hands of the people was something that predated Castro’s political career.”
But Castro then went a step further in 1960, Guerra said, and “deliberately provoked a confrontation with the US” by carrying out mass nationalizations of American companies, including oil refineries, sugar plants and banks.
The White House responded with economic sanctions, and then-President Dwight Eisenhower established the first embargo with an export ban, beginning an economic blockade of Cuba that has lasted, with a few variations, for nearly 70 years.
At the time, the US certified nearly 6,000 claims from American citizens and companies for properties nationalized in Cuba, with an original estimated value of approximately $1.9 billion — now over $9 billion, accounting for the 6% simple interest rate that the US applied in 1960.
The fight between former property holders and the Cuban government was enshrined into US law in 1996, after the shootdown of two US planes by the Cuban military. The Helms-Burton Act aims to limit commercial operations by third countries in Cuba but also allows US citizens to sue those who “traffic” in expropriated properties.
The law also directly ties any rapprochement between the US and Cuba to those assets. Lifting the embargo requires Cuba to transition to a “representative democracy” – and for that new government to take “appropriate steps” to return expropriated assets.
One of the US citizens hoping to be reimbursed is Enrique Carillo, a writer whose family owned a large rum business in Cuba until the industry was nationalized after the revolution. He told CNN that the Trump administration’s posture regarding Cuba has him optimistic.
“I never really foresaw the possibility of the recovery of Cuban assets being in play so soon,” Carrillo told CNN. “I didn’t even know that it would happen in my lifetime – but that is what’s new. I absolutely wish to recover our assets. We also are prepared to do so.”
Guerra, the professor at the University of Florida, has a less sunny outlook. She thinks that the exile-driven claims are less about the property rights of everyday Cubans, and more about nostalgia for Cuba before the revolution, when the landowning class held tremendous power over the island.
“There’s a community of very right-wing people who want to recover what was, for them, a wonderful past in Cuba,” Guerra said. “Trump is not interested in helping me recover my grandfather’s house in Fontanar. He’s interested in helping the powerful families who want revenge recover what they think they’re owed.”
But Gutiérrez rejects the characterization of the movement to regain lost property as “right-wing.”
“I tend to be conservative, and I am a Republican politically,” Gutiérrez said. “But the positions that I’m advocating for Cuba, I don’t think can fairly be described as far-right.”
Meanwhile, in Cuba
Torres, an economist at American University, said that the likelihood the Cuban government can repay diaspora Cubans for expropriated property is very low.
“In the economic conditions Cuba is in today, a massive, total, immediate compensation cannot be contemplated,” Torres said. “It would be entirely impossible.”
Cuba also has claims of its own against the United States. Each year, the Cuban government files a complaint with the United Nations over harms caused by the longstanding embargo. In 2025, it claimed that accumulated losses over recent decades amounted to approximately $170 billion.
Additionally, in 1999 Cuba filed a lawsuit for “human damages” from decades of US and Cuban exile militant activity, including a 1976 bombing on a domestic Cuban flight that killed 73 people. A Cuban court sentenced the U.S. government to pay the Cuban government $181.1 billion. The ruling came soon after a US judge ordered Cuba to pay $187 million to the families of those killed in the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.
Torres said that the best model for the sticky question of Cuban assets might be found in a different Cold War context: Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnam sought reparations and reconstruction support. But by the late 70s, the Vietnamese stopped actively pressing for reparations without formally abandoning their original position.
In Torres’ analysis, that concession paved a path for the US to eventually end its embargo, recognize Vietnam and provide humanitarian aid.
“If a real window opens to resolve the issues on the agenda, it wouldn’t surprise me if Cuba said, ‘We’re dropping these claims, we don’t want any obstacles,’” Torres said. “That’s what the Vietnamese did: when the process reopened, they never mentioned them again.”
Yet a Vietnam model for Cuba would, by definition, leave Cuba’s model of government intact. For Gutiérrez (and the Helms-Burton act), this is unacceptable.
“We’re very wary of any type of deal with elements of the regime, sort of like what happened in Venezuela,” Gutiérrez said. “We would like a new start.”
He believes that that “new start” might arrive as early as this year.
“We have an administration that has a Cuban-American secretary of state, and other Cuban Americans in key positions,” Gutiérrez continued. “There’s midterm elections coming up in November. I think something will be done before then.”
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