The US Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday over ExxonMobil's attempt to receive reimbursement for a refinery and other oil assets in Cuba that were seized in 1960 under the country's former president Fidel Castro.
The court's justices, in back-to-back arguments on two similar cases that lasted three hours, did not offer a clear sign on how they might rule. The justices focused their questions on whether a 1996 law, the Helms-Burton Act, should allow plaintiffs with seized assets to bypass a separate law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), that puts strict restrictions on when private entities are able to sue foreign governments in US courts.
ExxonMobil and other plaintiffs had been unable to sue Cuba for decades after the Helms-Burton Act first passed. All past US presidents had used a mechanism in the law to suspend those lawsuits, on the basis that the lawsuits could impede Cuba's transition to democracy. But President Donald Trump in 2019 lifted the suspension, opening what justices described as a "flood" of lawsuits.
ExxonMobil filed its lawsuit in 2019, seeking reimbursement and interest for assets owned by its predecessor, Standard Oil, that at the time of the seizure were valued at $71mn. Federal courts that have heard the lawsuit have determined the Helms-Burton Act did not waive Cuba's sovereign immunity under FSIA. ExxonMobil is seeking to overturn those rulings so it can sue Cuba's state-owned Cimex to recover damages it says it is owed.
The court's conservative justices on Monday questioned why the Helms-Burton Act had an "on-off" toggle for the president to authorize lawsuits, unless they believed the law would allow a vast amount of lawsuits against Cuba that could undermine its transition to democracy.
"Why would Congress have put that in there, except for if it thought the FSIA didn't apply?" chief justice John Roberts asked.
But other justices said the text of the 1996 law was not clear that the goal was to waive sovereign immunity, a major issue in international law.
"If Congress' intention was to give the president a toggle switch with respect to sovereign immunity, wouldn't we have expected to see that in the statute?" judge Ketanji Brown Jackson asked during arguments. "Because that's an extraordinary thing."
Cimex has argued to the court that the 1996 law did not create a clear carve-out to FSIA. The lawsuit also has a "slim to non-existent" chance of recovering any money, the company has said, because there is little or no Cuban property in the US that could be seized. The other case the court heard on Monday focuses on litigation involving cruise ships in Cuba.
