Despite his title, the president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba has by no means been to Cuba. Nor does he function any sugar mills there.
“I grew up here in Miami,” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez instructed NCS. “My dad instilled this love of Cuba in me. When he died, he was amazed how much it had taken root.”
Gutiérrez, a lawyer and advisor, describes his late father as a “young millionaire” who fled Cuba after making an attempt to assist anti-Castro rebels, forsaking a tidy fortune in sugar mills, banks and different business ventures.
As president of the sugar mill house owners’ affiliation, Gutiérrez says he’s spent a lot of his profession advocating for diaspora Cubans in the United States who want to see the billions of {dollars} of property left behind in Cuba returned to them.
These days, issues are trying up. The 94-year-old former President Raúl Castro has been indicted by the US authorities, President Donald Trump has hinted that he’ll be “taking” Cuba quickly and a fellow Miami native, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is at the helm of American diplomacy.
“I have over the years represented maybe a thousand Cuban families like my own,” Gutiérrez mentioned. “We’ve been hopeful for many years, but we’ve never, never, never, never, never had a situation like this with so many factors at play that militate for a change in Cuba.”
One of these elements got here into play a couple of days after Gutiérrez spoke with NCS. The Supreme Court launched an 8-1 ruling allowing a lawsuit over property confiscated by the Cuban government to maneuver ahead.
Gutiérrez, who was not a plaintiff however had adopted the case carefully because it meandered by the US courtroom system, mentioned he was “thrilled” by the ruling. “It’s the culmination of decades of hard work,” he mentioned.
This central concern of Gutiérrez’s profession is a through-line of US-Cuba relations: the hundreds of claims by American residents and firms over property taken by Cuba’s communist authorities. Accounting for curiosity, the whole estimated worth is greater than $9 billion, in response to US authorities figures.
It’s “a fairly high-priority issue, one of the first to come up whenever both countries make contact,” economist Ricardo Torres of American University instructed NCS.
Cuba’s nationalization wave started quickly after Fidel Castro’s rebels took management of the island in 1959. Rural Cuba was profoundly impoverished and underdeveloped earlier than and through the Batista period, and land possession was scant amongst the working poor. First got here an agrarian reform program , which banned overseas land possession and broke up massive, privately-held estates and redistributed them to Cuba’s peasant class.
“At that time, there was a need for agrarian reform, for the nationalization of Cuba’s infrastructure,” mentioned Lillian Guerra, director of the Cuba program at the University of Florida. “That huge project of putting the country’s resources in the hands of the people was something that predated Castro’s political career.”
But Castro then went a step additional in 1960, Guerra mentioned, and “deliberately provoked a confrontation with the US” by finishing up mass nationalizations of American firms, together with oil refineries, sugar crops and banks.
The White House responded with financial sanctions, and then-President Dwight Eisenhower established the first embargo with an export ban, starting an financial blockade of Cuba that has lasted, with a couple of variations, for practically 70 years.
At the time, the US licensed practically 6,000 claims from American residents and corporations for properties nationalized in Cuba, with an authentic estimated worth of roughly $1.9 billion — now over $9 billion, accounting for the 6% simple interest rate that the US utilized in 1960.
The battle between former property holders and the Cuban authorities was enshrined into US regulation in 1996, after the shootdown of two US planes by the Cuban army. The Helms-Burton Act goals to restrict business operations by third nations in Cuba but in addition permits US residents to sue those that “traffic” in expropriated properties.
The regulation additionally immediately ties any rapprochement between the US and Cuba to these property. Lifting the embargo requires Cuba to transition to a “representative democracy” – and for that new authorities to take “appropriate steps” to return expropriated property.
One of the US residents hoping to be reimbursed is Enrique Carillo, a author whose household owned a big rum enterprise in Cuba till the business was nationalized after the revolution. He instructed NCS that the Trump administration’s posture concerning Cuba has him optimistic.
“I never really foresaw the possibility of the recovery of Cuban assets being in play so soon,” Carrillo instructed NCS. “I didn’t even know that it would happen in my lifetime – but that is what’s new. I absolutely wish to recover our assets. We also are prepared to do so.”
Guerra, the professor at the University of Florida, has a much less sunny outlook. She thinks that the exile-driven claims are much less about the property rights of on a regular basis Cubans, and extra about nostalgia for Cuba earlier than the revolution, when the landowning class held great energy over the island.
“There’s a community of very right-wing people who want to recover what was, for them, a wonderful past in Cuba,” Guerra mentioned. “Trump is not interested in helping me recover my grandfather’s house in Fontanar. He’s interested in helping the powerful families who want revenge recover what they think they’re owed.”
But Gutiérrez rejects the characterization of the motion to regain misplaced property as “right-wing.”
“I tend to be conservative, and I am a Republican politically,” Gutiérrez mentioned. “But the positions that I’m advocating for Cuba, I don’t think can fairly be described as far-right.”
Torres, an economist at American University, mentioned that the chance the Cuban authorities can repay diaspora Cubans for expropriated property could be very low.
“In the economic conditions Cuba is in today, a massive, total, immediate compensation cannot be contemplated,” Torres mentioned. “It would be entirely impossible.”
Cuba additionally has claims of its personal in opposition to the United States. Each yr, the Cuban authorities information a grievance with the United Nations over harms attributable to the longstanding embargo. In 2025, it claimed that accrued losses over current a long time amounted to roughly $170 billion.
Additionally, in 1999 Cuba filed a lawsuit for “human damages” from a long time of US and Cuban exile militant exercise, together with a 1976 bombing on a home Cuban flight that killed 73 individuals. A Cuban courtroom sentenced the U.S. authorities to pay the Cuban authorities $181.1 billion. The ruling got here quickly after a US choose ordered Cuba to pay $187 million to the households of these killed in the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.
Torres mentioned that the finest mannequin for the sticky query of Cuban property could be present in a distinct Cold War context: Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnam sought reparations and reconstruction help. But by the late 70s, the Vietnamese stopped actively urgent for reparations with out formally abandoning their authentic place.
In Torres’ evaluation, that concession paved a path for the US to ultimately finish its embargo, acknowledge Vietnam and supply humanitarian help.
“If a real window opens to resolve the issues on the agenda, it wouldn’t surprise me if Cuba said, ‘We’re dropping these claims, we don’t want any obstacles,’” Torres mentioned. “That’s what the Vietnamese did: when the process reopened, they never mentioned them again.”
Yet a Vietnam mannequin for Cuba would, by definition, depart Cuba’s mannequin of authorities intact. For Gutiérrez (and the Helms-Burton act), that is unacceptable.
“We’re very wary of any type of deal with elements of the regime, sort of like what happened in Venezuela,” Gutiérrez mentioned. “We would like a new start.”
He believes that that “new start” would possibly arrive as early as this yr.
“We have an administration that has a Cuban-American secretary of state, and other Cuban Americans in key positions,” Gutiérrez continued. “There’s midterm elections coming up in November. I think something will be done before then.”