I’ve known for a long time that the United States’ passionate opposition to the Castro regime in Cuba was driven at the outset largely by powerful people who lost assets when the economy there was nationalized. Some of these people were simple mobsters who ran operations of ill repute, but there were major corporate losses, too. Apparently, many of these corporations are still holding out hope that they will be compensated.
The federal government has a whole outfit, the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, tasked with overseeing these claims. When a foreign country expropriates (or nationalizes) a U.S. company’s assets, as happened in Cuba but has also occurred in China, Vietnam and elsewhere, the companies file a claim with the commission. It then examines its validity and, if it checks out, the claim is officially certified. It is then up to either the companies individually to negotiate a settlement with the foreign government or for the federal government to negotiate on behalf of the companies with claims as a whole.
In Cuba, American corporations have 5,913 claims that were worth $1.9 billion when they were certified in the 1960s. Those claims have been accruing interest for the last half century, at a 6 percent simple rate, meaning that they are worth upwards of $7.5 billion in 2014. Because of the U.S. embargo of Cuba and lack of any formal diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the claims have never been resolved.
Some big U.S. claimants, like the Cuban Electric Company, became effectively defunct, but other marquee names like ITT Tech, Exxon, Texaco, Coca-Cola and Freeport-McMoRan mining have standing claims worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That isn’t the kind of value that Fortune 500 companies are going to just write off, Muse said.
“You’ll hear things from people who don’t know this, ‘Oh the claims have been written off,’” [Robert] Muse [a Washington, D.C., attorney who specializes in Cuban issues] said. “No one should imagine that the general counsel of these companies is unaware of that or that their shareholders are unaware of it.”
If you’re looking for a diversion today, you can peruse longtime Tribber Lisa Pease’s March-April 1996 Probe article on Freeport-McMoRan’s history in Indonesia.
You may be familiar with the role of the United Fruit Company in the Guatemalan coup of 1954, or ITT‘s role in overthrowing the Brazilian government in 1964 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.
Whatever you may think about communism or the human rights record of the Castro brothers, the record is unambiguous. The way the Cold War played out in Latin American and the Caribbean had little to do with advancing core American values that we are taught in school like freedom of religion and speech and the importance of representative government and free and fair elections. Rather, our policy served the interests of corporate shareholders who did not want to see their financial holdings nationalized by left-leaning elected governments.
This is the real history, and the real context within which Cuba and the USA have battled for hearts and minds in this hemisphere for the past half century. It’s too simple to call one side good and the other side evil, but the one thing we should be crystal clear about is that our government’s policy has not been driven by what is best of the people of this or any other country. Our government has taken hypocrisy to a new level and resorted to the rankest and basest kind of propaganda to justify their actions.
That doesn’t mean that Cuba should have succeeded in exporting their revolution. It just means that we the people shouldn’t support these corporations’ efforts to get reparations from Cuba. It would be much better if we were paid the reparations in compensation for having been lied to so egregiously for so long. We got nothing out of the fifty year war against Cuba except a closed market, travel restrictions, and the sick feeling all decent people get when their government acts despicably.
