Iberostar, one of the Spanish companies sued under the Helms-Burton Act in the United States, has moved to dismiss that lawsuit, the main argument being that the court does not have jurisdiction over a company domiciled in Spain without a commercial or physical presence .im State of Florida.
In a court document to which Efe had access this Thursday, which contains an affidavit by Alberto Llompart, General Counsel of Iberostar Hoteles y Apartamentos, SL, the company’s lawyers are developing this and other arguments to support the 2020 of María Dolores’ lawsuit to invalidate Cantó Martí in federal courts in Miami.
The plaintiff claims to have legal rights to property in Cuba where her family had a hotel, which was confiscated from them after the victory of the revolution in 1959, and alleges that Iberostar benefited from the operation of that property, therefore in accordance with the title III of the Helms-Burton Act entitled to financial compensation.
As HOSTELTUR in Spain reports, Brussels is urging it to seek a suspension of the Helms-Burton Act. In 2021, the Spanish government asked Brussels to take advantage of the arrival of new President Joe Biden at the White House to suspend, as soon as possible, the Helms-Burton Act, the law whose reactivation by Donald Trump’s previous administration was targeting Spanish tourism investment in had done so much harm to Cuba.
In more than three years, 44 lawsuits have been filed and only one has been finalized and not decided in court
During the tenure of Donald Trump, the Spanish hotel companies established in Cuba, such as melia, Barcelona either Iberostarsaw their investments on the island threatened by the US government’s decision to reactivate Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which allows them to sue in US courts for property expropriated by the Cuban revolutionary government beginning in 1959.
Title III, which went into effect on May 2, 2019 by decision of then-President Donald Trump after 23 years in limbo, allows companies benefiting from property seized in Cuba before 1996 to sue in the United States. , the year the Helms-Burton Act went into effect.
Iberostar arguments
Iberostar, based on the island of Mallorca, not only challenges the jurisdiction of the Miami court in this case, but also denies having operated the Hotel Imperial and points out that the rights of the plaintiff, María Dolores Cantó Martí, in the confiscated property do not exist they are proven.
“Iberostar Spain does not own and has never owned Hotel Imperial,” said Llompart, who also denies that his company managed or operated it in partnership with the Cuban government.
According to Llompart, Hotel Imperial did not display the Iberostar brand banner when the lawsuit was filed. “He only had it between 2017 and 2019,” he points out.
According to the US-Cuba Economic and Commercial Council, a private and non-profit organization that has taken care of collecting all information related to the Title III lawsuits, the 44 lawsuits filed so far involve companies from 15 countries. These are the US, Cuba, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Panama, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand and the UK.
Of these claims, 15 are “authenticated,” meaning they were US citizens who lost their property in Cuba, and 29 are unauthenticated, meaning they were Cuban citizens or citizens of other countries.
87 companies sued
The council, headed by John Kavulich, produced a list of 87 companies that have actually been sued or notified that they may be sued, which is a prior step provided for in the title.
Amazon, Visa, Booking, Expedia, Mastercard and Trivago make the list, along with BNP Paribas, BBVA, Meliá, Iberostar, Barceló, NH Hotels, Pernod Ricard, Iberia, Air Europa, Latam, Societe Generale.
Some of the companies had various lawsuits. The travel platform Expedia, which is involved in eight cases, holds the record.
According to the council, the only plaintiffs who have received compensation so far are the Clafins, a family seized by the Cuban regime in 1960 from what was then the “Soledad Sugar Company”.
In 2020, the Clafins filed a lawsuit in a South Florida court against Swiss multinational LafargeHolcim for conducting business in Cuba using assets they had expropriated, and the following year both parties reached an indemnification agreement for an undisclosed amount that the case was finally closed.
The judiciary has only issued one ruling requiring each of the four cruise line defendants, Norwegian, Carnival, Royal Caribbean and MSC, to pay about $100 million, but they can still appeal.
Ten lawsuits are currently being heard in the Courts of Appeal, and the same judicial authorities have already dismissed six. According to the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, US authorities have certified 5,913 cases of the country’s citizens and businesses eligible to benefit from Title III, for a total of $1,900 million, which would add up to more than 60 years with interest 8.521 million. To this enormous sum we must add an unassessed amount for the ‘non-certified’ claims.