The retaking of Cuba

In 1960, Cuba took its docks, sugar and power back from American owners. This May, Washington moved to take them back: it indicted Raul Castro over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, sailed an aircraft carrier into the Caribbean, and won Supreme Court backing for claims over confiscated property. None of this is improvised. The rollout looks chaotic, like much of the spectacle of the current US regime, but its impact is anything but. Behind this convergence sits old machinery. The US embargo, begun under Eisenhower and tightened under Kennedy, is older than most Cubans alive today. The Helms-Burton Act, a US law since 1996, lets US nationals sue any company that uses property Cuba confiscated from Americans, whether it docks at, ships through or builds on it. Those Americans were mostly US corporations and the Creole families who became Americans in exile. The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission has held its 5,913 certified claims, worth $1.9bn in principal and some $9bn with interest, since the 1960s. Waiting. What is new is not the design but its speed: the taking, and the retaking. The pace of the retaking recently sped up: on January 3, 2026, US forces seized Venezuela’s president in a predawn raid on Caracas and, in the same operation, killed 32 Cuban officers. The raid cut one of Cuba’s lifelines: Venezuelan oil. Mexico moved to cover the gap, but within weeks, it halted shipments as Washington threatened tariffs on any country that supplied Cuba. …