The case centers on Havana Docks Corporation, which held usufruct concessions to operate dock facilities in Havana until 2004. In 1960, the Cuban government sent armed soldiers to seize control of those docks without paying compensation. Decades later, Royal Caribbean Cruises and other cruise lines paid Cuban state security forces roughly $130 million to use the same docks, generating approximately $1 billion in revenue, without obtaining authorization from Havana Docks. Four judgments were entered against four cruise lines in the district court. The Eleventh Circuit reversed, and petitioner and the government characterized that ruling as treating the confiscation as though it had never occurred and asking whether the plaintiff would have held a property interest at the time of the alleged trafficking — a test that extinguished the claim because the concession expired in 2004.
At oral argument on February 23, 2026, the central dispute was whether the property which was confiscated that triggers Title III liability refers to the physical docks themselves or only to the time-limited concession interest that Cuba seized from Havana Docks. Petitioner's counsel Richard D. Klingler argued that the anti-trafficking prohibition attaches to the underlying facilities — the docks — not merely to the duration of the plaintiff's interest, and that the remedy functions like a takings claim that continues until Cuba pays compensation or returns the property. The United States, appearing as amicus curiae supporting the petitioner through Assistant to the Solicitor General Aimee Brown, argued that the Eleventh Circuit's approach improperly pretended the expropriation never happened, and that the certified claim — which the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission valued taking into account the remaining 44 years of the concession, according to both counsel — encumbers the property like a lien until compensation is paid or the property returned.
Respondents' counsel Paul D. Clement argued for a one-to-one correspondence between what was confiscated and what was trafficked: because the only interest Havana Docks held was a time-limited concession that expired in 2004, anyone arriving after that date cannot be trafficking in the property interest that was confiscated. He pointed to the statutory text requiring liability to run to the person who owns the claim to such property, with such property referring back to the specific confiscated interest, and invoked Tahoe-Sierra for the proposition that both spatial and temporal limits define the metes and bounds of a property interest. He also noted that the district court awarded the full $9 million claim value even though the cruise lines concededly did not traffic in the thousand shares of Cuban telephone stock or the roughly $300,000 in repudiated debts also covered by the certified claim.
Several justices pressed the multiple-recovery problem. Justice Sotomayor questioned whether allowing recovery from an unlimited number of future users vastly exceeding the original value of the concession raises due process and excessive-fines concerns, though she acknowledged those issues were not squarely before the Court. Justice Gorsuch asked Brown directly whether the government believed the statute permits multiple recoveries; Brown said the government had not taken an express position in the briefing on that question, but suggested that the possibility of multiple recoveries was consistent with Congress's foreign-policy purpose of treating trafficking as a poison pill to deter companies from doing business with Cuba rather than a mere cost of doing business. Justice Kavanaugh followed up pressing Brown on whether the government had a position; Brown elaborated that Congress's foreign-policy findings suggested it was not particularly concerned with multiple recoveries. Justice Gorsuch noted he was grateful not to have to resolve the multiple-recovery question.
Justice Jackson appeared most sympathetic to petitioner, pressing Clement on why the FCSC's certified claim process, which the statute specifically creates to determine the scope of a claimant's property interest, should not be treated as doing the work of defining what property is off-limits for trafficking purposes. She observed that the certified claim carries no termination provision mirroring the underlying concession's expiration. Justice Kagan, by contrast, repeatedly returned to the intuition that the property confiscated from Havana Docks was the time-limited concession, not the docks themselves, and that once a temporal boundary on a property interest runs out, the holder is in no different position than a stranger to the property.
Klingler's rebuttal noted that the cruise line industry association, when the private right of action appeared likely to be reinstated, assessed that its members faced a tremendous amount of risk — not that the 2005 cutoff provided a clean defense — and that the Cleo memo in the Joint Appendix reflected that assessment. He argued that under the Eleventh Circuit's approach, almost all business leases over a 65-year period will have evaporated, leaving almost nothing of Title III's anti-trafficking remedy intact.