Supreme Court revives damages suit against cruise ship companies that docked in Cuba

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court subjected the world’s largest cruise ship companies to a stiff headwind on Thursday, reviving a claim that alleged they trafficked in property confiscated by the Cuban government when they docked their ships in Havana.

The court’s decision is a loss for Royal Caribbean Cruises, Carnival Corporation and other companies and lands at a moment when the Trump administration is ramping up economic and political pressure on Cuba.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion for an 8-1 court. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan was the sole dissenter.

The decision comes a day after the Department of Justice indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges that stem from his alleged role in the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft that killed four people, including three Americans. While announcing the charges, Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said President Donald Trump would soon make an announcement on the Cuban embargo.

Trump has also flirted with military action in Cuba, telling reporters on March 17 he might have the “honor of taking Cuba.”

The case was tied to property confiscated in 1960 shortly after Castro came to power in the island nation’s revolution and involved a law Congress passed in 1996 allowing US nationals to sue over that seized property in US courts.

Havana Docks Corporation built Havana’s piers in 1905 for the Cuban government on the condition that it would operate the port for 99 years. Castro’s government seized the docks shortly after coming to power.

The world’s largest cruise lines, the company said, “nonetheless moored their massive ships at the confiscated docks without Havana Docks’ authorization” from 2015 to 2019. In its appeal, the company described the case as the most important involving US foreign policy toward Cuba to reach the Supreme Court in decades.

“Havana Docks has shown that the cruise lines used confiscated property in which Havana Docks had a property interest and to which it owns a claim,” Thomas wrote for the majority.

The decision Thursday does not decide the case but rather allows the Havana Docks litigation to proceed.

Kagan argued that the court fundamentally misread the case.

“The docks belonged to the Cuban Government– not Havana Docks – all along,” she wrote in dissent. “What Havana Docks owned was only a property interest allowing it to use those docks for a specified time. And that time-limited interest expired in 2004 – more than a decade before the cruise lines ever used the docks.”

During the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure and much of the first Trump administration, the company said, “the cruise lines disembarked nearly one million tourists on those docks, and paid Cuba’s cash-strapped Communist regime at least $130 million in hard currency without paying a penny to either Havana Docks or any Cuban person or entity unaffiliated with the regime.”

In the cruise ship case, the question was whether the company could collect damages even though its lease on the docks would have expired in 2004 without the Castro takeover. The Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the cruise lines and the Havana Docks Corporation appealed to the Supreme Court last year.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.