Four cruise ships were sentenced by the American judiciary to pay almost $450 million on Friday. Your fault: you used a port in Havana (Cuba) that was nationalized by the Cuban authorities in 1960.
The four cruise lines convicted are Carnival, MSC SA, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian. Each must pay $109 million plus legal fees to the American company Havana Docks. After the Castro revolution on the Caribbean island, the rights to operate the port were withdrawn.
A law from 1996 was applied for the first time
The United States has imposed an economic embargo on the island since 1962. However, Democratic President Barack Obama relaxed the rules and allowed cruise ship passengers to stop in Cuba in 2016, a decision later reversed by his Republican successor, Donald Trump.
According to the judge, the four shipping companies whose liners call at Cuba “have made significant profits in the order of several hundred million dollars each” from their illegal activities in this port. The verdict is not based on the embargo, but on a 1996 law that had remained dead letter until then.
A measure that came into force under Trump
With this law, Congress sought to deter potential investors in Cuba by empowering any American whose assets were confiscated by Fidel Castro’s regime to sue those who benefit from their use. Successive American presidents blocked the use of this measure until Donald Trump decided to enact it in 2019.
A series of legal steps followed. That regarding the four cruise ship passengers now guilty of “human trafficking” and “illicit tourism” is the first to succeed. You can appeal this decision, but it could have serious repercussions for the Cuban economy, which is going through its worst crisis since the 1990s.