Long before it became one of Cuba’s most popular tourist destinations in the 1990s, the small island of Cayo Coco, with its pristine beaches and powdery white sands, attracted a different kind of clientele.
Inspired by its unspoiled beauty, and his observations of shack-dwelling fishermen scratching out a meager living, Ernest Hemingway set scenes from two of his most famous books there, including the 1952 classic The Old Man and the Sea.
Then came the giant all-inclusive mega-resort hotels that have proliferated in recent decades along the island’s northern coast, and brought in millions of desperately needed dollars for a largely destitute Cuban government.
Now, there’s a bitterly contested multimillion-dollar lawsuit that has implications for the descendants of dozens of Cuban exiles in the US who have been fighting for decades for compensation for land and property seized following Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist revolution.
Mario Echeverría, head of a Cuban American family in Miami that says it owned Cayo Coco, and saw it stolen from them in Castro’s aggressive land reforms, won a $30m verdict this month from the travel giant Expedia after a two-week trial. The jury said Expedia, and subsidiaries Orbitz and hotels.com, illegally profited from promoting and selling vacation packages at hotels there.
The rare lawsuit was one of the first brought under Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, also known as the Helms-Burton Act. The act was designed to finally open a legal pathway for such compensation claims, but was suspended by successive presidents until Donald Trump made the decision to activate it in 2019.
The intention was to deter US and international companies from investing in Cuba by exposing them to potentially huge financial penalties for conducting business there.
For Echeverría, who reminisced about his grandmother tending the beachfront at Cayo Coco in a moving Spanish-language interview with UniVista TV earlier this year, the verdict is not the end of the story.
He and his family may never see a penny after Federico Moreno, the district court judge overseeing the case, paused the award and set a further hearing for August seeking “specific evidence” that the family itself legally acquired the land on Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1898.
The only other previously adjudicated Helms-Burton penalty, a $439m illegal tourism ruling in 2022 against four major cruise lines operating from Havana, was overturned last year. An appeals court said a claim by descendants of the original dock owners was essentially out of time.
A handful of other cases, meanwhile, have stalled – including one by the oil giant Exxon Mobil that claims various Cub
