The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that Cuba's state-owned enterprises cannot hide behind foreign sovereign immunity to dodge lawsuits over property the Castro regime confiscated more than six decades ago. The decision in Exxon Mobil v. Corporación CIMEX hands a major legal victory to the oil giant, and to every American company still waiting for compensation after Cuba's communist government stole what it built.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the six conservative justices, held that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act strips sovereign immunity from Cuban agencies and instrumentalities. The three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, as Just The News reported.
The ruling reverses a lower court's 2024 decision that had allowed CIMEX, Cuba's largest state-owned conglomerate, to invoke the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act as a shield. The case now returns to that lower court for deliberations on CIMEX's potential liability, and the stakes are enormous. Exxon's claim, originally valued at $70 million when Fidel Castro's government seized its oil and gas assets in 1959, now exceeds $1 billion with interest and potential enhanced damages.
The Helms-Burton Act has been on the books since 1996. Title III of the law permits lawsuits in U.S. courts against anyone who "traffics" in property confiscated by Cuba's communist government after the 1959 revolution. But Congress also gave the president authority to suspend Title III on national security grounds, and three successive presidents did exactly that, citing diplomatic sensitivities with allies including Canada and Spain.
The provision sat dormant for more than two decades. Then, during his first term, President Trump lifted the suspension in 2019. Exxon filed suit that same year, arguing that CIMEX had been unlawfully using a refinery and service stations that once belonged to Standard Oil, Exxon's corporate predecessor.
Roughly 40 cases were filed under the Helms-Burton Act in 2019 and 2020 after the suspension was lifted. Tuesday's ruling removes the sovereign immunity obstacle that threatened to gut all of them.
The Trump administration supported Exxon's appeal to the Supreme Court, consistent with its broader pressure campaign against Cuba's government. That campaign has included threatening sanctions on countries supplying Cuba with fuel and, just last month, bringing criminal charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro, Fidel's 94-year-old brother, related to the 1996 shootdown of humanitarian planes.
The core legal question was straightforward: Does a plaintiff suing a Cuban entity under the Helms-Burton Act also need to satisfy the separate requirements of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976? The conservative majority said no.
National Review reported that Kavanaugh wrote pointedly in the majority opinion:
"Time did not stop in 1976."
Kavanaugh argued that Congress, in passing the Helms-Burton Act two decades after the FSIA, deliberately created a pathway for private suits that would otherwise be blocked. As he put it in the opinion, the Helms-Burton Act "authorizes private suits against Cuban agencies and instrumentalities, suits that would largely be nonstarters if subjected to the FSIA's requirements."
He also rebutted the dissent directly, writing that "it is not as if Congress, when enacting the Helms-Burton Act, somehow forgot that the FSIA and [its jurisdictional provision] existed." In other words, Congress knew what it was doing. It meant to open the courthouse doors, and the Court's job was to honor that intent, not second-guess it.
The ruling fits a broader pattern this term of the Court's conservative supermajority delivering decisive outcomes on contested legal questions. The same 6-3 ideological alignment has appeared in recent rulings backing the Trump administration on green card enforcement, among other cases.
Justice Kagan, writing for the three liberal dissenters, argued that the majority was reading too much into the Helms-Burton Act. Her position: plaintiffs should still have to demonstrate their suit fell within an exception to the FSIA's sovereign immunity protections.
As the New York Post reported, Kagan wrote:
"Nothing in the text or 'architecture' of the Helms-Burton Act suggests that Congress abrogated the sovereign immunity of these defendants, much less that it did so with the requisite unmistakable clarity."
It is a tidy argument in the abstract. But it runs headlong into the practical reality Kavanaugh identified: if the FSIA still applies, the Helms-Burton Act's private right of action is functionally meaningless. Congress would have created a right to sue and then left in place the very defense that makes suing impossible. That is not how serious legislatures write law, and it is not how courts should read it.
The dissent's insistence on "unmistakable clarity" also raises a familiar question about the liberal bloc's approach to statutory interpretation. When Congress passes a law that plainly authorizes suits against Cuban state entities, demanding some further, more explicit abrogation of sovereign immunity starts to look less like principled textualism and more like an effort to protect a communist government's ill-gotten gains from legal accountability.
The Court has handled other high-profile cases this term with similar ideological fault lines. Readers following the justices' work will recall the unanimous ruling striking down a federal gun ban for marijuana users, a reminder that the Court can find common ground, though on questions involving Cuba, the liberal wing apparently draws a harder line.
The implications stretch well past one oil company's balance sheet. Approximately 40 Helms-Burton Act cases were filed in 2019 and 2020 after the Trump administration lifted the Title III suspension. Many of those cases hit the same sovereign immunity wall that CIMEX tried to use.
Tuesday's ruling removes that wall. Cuban state-owned entities that profited from confiscated American property can now face lawsuits without invoking the FSIA as an automatic escape hatch.
Newsmax reported earlier this year that four major cruise lines, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Line, and MSC Cruises, also face liability for using docks seized by Cuba, with prior judgments already exceeding $100 million. The scope of potential claims is significant, and the Court's decision likely opens the floodgates for claimants who had been stalled by the immunity defense.
The decision also reinforces the Trump administration's broader posture toward Havana. The administration has declared Cuba "an unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security. Between the criminal charges against Raúl Castro, the sanctions pressure on Cuba's fuel supply, and now the Supreme Court clearing the way for private litigation, the legal and diplomatic vise is tightening.
Courts at every level have been active arenas for policy disputes in this era. The same dynamics, conservative majorities enforcing statutory text while liberal dissenters urge restraint, have played out in cases ranging from birthright citizenship litigation to policing standards.
Exxon's claim traces back to 1959, when Castro's revolutionary government confiscated everything Standard Oil owned on the island, refineries, service stations, oil and gas assets. Those properties were transferred to CIMEX, which has held and profited from them ever since. For more than six decades, no American court delivered a meaningful mechanism for recovery.
The Helms-Burton Act was supposed to change that in 1996. But presidential suspensions kept Title III dormant for 23 years. When Trump finally activated it in 2019, the Cuban government's next line of defense was sovereign immunity. Now the Supreme Court has cleared that obstacle, too.
The case is not over. It returns to a lower court, where CIMEX's potential liability will be litigated on the merits. But the legal architecture is now firmly in Exxon's favor, and in favor of every other American company or individual whose property was stolen by a communist regime that has never offered a dime in compensation.
The broader lesson from this term's rulings, including decisions touching on issues from race-based programs to immigration enforcement, is that the conservative majority is willing to enforce the law as written, even when doing so discomforts regimes, bureaucracies, or legal doctrines that have grown comfortable with inaction.
Sixty-six years is a long time to wait for your day in court. Thanks to six justices who read the statute Congress actually passed, Exxon, and dozens of other claimants, may finally get one.