Cuba says it is willing to seek an arrangement “satisfactory for all parties” on nationalised properties, including those belonging to Cubans who emigrated after the revolution.
The statement, made exclusively to The National by Carlos Mendez, Cuba's Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment, is the clearest signal yet that the issue is no longer entirely off the table.
“We are willing to seek an agreement, an arrangement that is satisfactory for all parties, considering both the foreign companies that were in Cuba and were nationalised, and also seeking arrangements that can be acceptable for Cubans who at some point emigrated from the country,” Mr Mendez said.
He also extended a direct invitation to the diaspora, saying Cuba is open to them contributing “in different business models, in different sectors, in different activities”.
Ahmed Faisal, an Egyptian-born business consultant working with Cuban officials to open up their economy, said the statement carried more weight than its careful wording suggested.
He said Cuban Americans with the capital to restore their former properties were likely to regain full ownership, while those without the funds would need outside investors to take an equity stake.
“If they have the required capital to get it back up and running, they are ready to give them back full ownership,” he said. The aim is to inject desperately needed funds into Cuba's economy.
Is it enough?
Despite this major move, experts say it is unlikely to satisfy Washington.
Mario Braga, a geopolitical analyst at global risk intelligence company RANE Network, said property restitution may be a prerequisite but falls well short of what the US is actually demanding.
“I think that it's perhaps a prerequisite, but then we would also need to consider, among other things, Cuba expelling or the removal of intelligence officers from Russia, from China, that operate on the island,” he said. Major political reform would also be required, he added.
Arturo Lopez-Levy, a Cuban-born research fellow at Georgia College, said the government was not in a position to offer full restitution. “I don't think that the Cuban government is in conditions, in political terms, to even consider a restitution of properties to Cuban Americans who lost them in the early years of the revolution,” he said. Most have been destroyed or occupied by other families, foreign companies, or hotels, he added.
Even a compensation or debt-for-investment arrangement, he argued, would not shift Washington's position. “Even some of those actions will not provoke an immediate rethinking of the American policy towards Cuba, particularly in the case of Marco Rubio,” he said, referring to the Cuban-American US Secretary of State.
Prof Helen Yaffe, of the University of Glasgow, raised a more fundamental question about what restitution for Cuban Americans would mean in practice. “Their mansions have been converted into homes, apartments, schools, offices, research centres,” she said. “Imagine if they [the Cuban government] did say: 'OK, yeah, you can come back and get your property.' What would happen to thousands of Cuban families who have made their homes or workplaces there?”
She also questioned whether the most powerful voices in the Cuban-American community have any real intention of returning. “Can you imagine Rubio giving up his mansions in the United States, go and live in impoverished Cuba? I very much doubt that,” she added.
Ms Yaffe also argued that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the US economic embargo on Cuba makes any partial concession legally insufficient, stipulating the embargo cannot be lifted until Cuba transitions to democracy and adopts a capitalist market economy. “They will settle at nothing less than the absolute defeat and humiliation of the revolutionary government,” she said.
The history behind these claims stretches to 1959, when tens of thousands of Cubans fled to the United States, leaving behind property nationalised by the revolutionary government. That exiled community eventually secured the Helms-Burton Act and with it a statutory veto over any normalisation of relations.
Today, its most powerful embodiment is the US Secretary of State. As Lopez-Levy put it: “They don't want simply a kind of agreement or a national reconciliation that will address the properties. They are now eager to retake power in Havana.”
