The ‘New York Times’ interviews a descendant of a family of industrialists from Santiago, Cuba, who lost a railroad, a sawmill, a shipyard, a cement factory and a farm, valued at nearly $900 million
14ymedio, Madrid, 28 April 2026 / Along with political prisoners and internet access via Starlink, the US government maintains a specific demand in its talks with the Cuban regime: compensation for confiscated properties. The amount totals nearly $9 billion, calculated from an original estimated value of $1.9 billion plus 6% annual interest. The bill is impossible to pay, although Havana has responded: If Washington compensates with the $181 billion it estimates the damage caused by the embargo to be, there will be no problem.
The gap between the two positions is long-standing, and this isn’t the first time an attempt has been made to resolve it, but there has never been an agreement, and as time goes on, the difficulty only widens. Teo A. Babún, Jr., knows this well. He is the heir to a family of industrialists who left the island after the triumph of the Revolution. His grandmother managed a large house in Santiago de Cuba, where eight children and twenty-one grandchildren lived, before she left everything behind.
And that is a lot: a railroad, a sawmill, a shipyard, a cement factory, and the farm. Her assets represent 10% of the amount certified by the State Department in its overall claim, valued at $874.2 million in 2018. “We have to find a solution that protects the current occupants if it’s a home and doesn’t displace anyone. And at the same time, justice must be served,” Babún Jr. acknowledges in a report published Tuesday in The New York Times about this long-standing issue.
Raúl Castro himself came to live on the estate, which is now the Arab House, headquarters of an association with a restaurant included.
Raúl Castro himself lived on the property, which is now the Casa Árabe, headquarters of an association with a restaurant included. Ironically, the Babún family was of Lebanese origin. “If someone owns something and then takes it away without any compensation or recourse, it’s simply not fair. My family just wants justice,” he adds.
At 78, he has finally completed a project he began long ago to create a registry to help the State Department pursue claims. He stopped when he had processed 8,000 cases, which were a drop in the ocean. Of the 6,000 cases certified by Washington, ten involve giants, including five sugar companies. The claimants include such well-known names as Exxon, Coca-Cola, and Colgate-Palmolive.
The NYT takes a look back at some of the times a possible solution has been addressed, starting with the one in the 1960s. “Cuba did not have the cash to pay and, instead, offered long-term government bonds, which the United States considered neither a prompt nor an adequate solution,” says William LeoGrande, a professor at American University and author of a book on the history of negotiations between the United States and Cuba.
In the 1990s, several experts put forward different proposals, including the creation of public-private funds to rebuild Cuba’s electrical grid and the use of some of the profits to compensate former owners, according to Jason Poblete, an attorney representing both American and Cuban owners. This type of arrangement worked in countries like Vietnam and Germany, where assets frozen in the U.S. were used to pay claims. This was not the case in the USSR or China, where owners recovered very little.
During the era of the thaw in relations, the Obama administration also attempted to find a solution to the issue, but it failed due to the regime’s disconnect from the reality of the problem. “The Cuban government didn’t seem to understand. They would ask me, ‘Richard, why are you making such a big deal about something that happened 50 or 60 years ago?’” says Richard Feinberg, a researcher at Florida International University who was in Havana to conduct a study on property claims. “This shows how little the Cuban government understood about economics and capitalism. They didn’t understand private property,” he adds.
“This shows how little the Cuban government understood about economics and capitalism. They didn’t understand private property.”
The NYT spoke with other affected individuals, including Lisandro Pérez, a Cuba expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and author of a memoir about his family’s home in Cuba. Pérez laments that some Cubans who remained did receive some form of compensation for their losses, which was not the case for him.
Nicolás J. Gutiérrez, a Cuban-American lawyer in Miami, recounts estimated losses of $50 million in 1960. His properties included two sugar mills, 15 cattle ranches, a rice mill, a coffee plantation, a bank, an insurance company, and a wholesale food distribution company.
Now, as a member of the National Association of Cuban Landowners in Exile, he is working on the lawsuit against Expedia for operating hotels built on confiscated land. Although he has never been to Cuba, he believes that if things change, his family will try again to revive the island’s economy.
“We’ve waited a long time for this moment and for the right conditions to arise,” says Enrique Carrillo, heir to the owners of the Santa Cruz rum distillery. “My father worked tirelessly for many years to build the company, and I don’t intend to give up. My family doesn’t intend to abandon its history.”
Meanwhile, a NYT correspondent in Havana visited El Vedado, where Nicolás J. Gutiérrez’s family owned a building. There, neighbors—like the experts themselves—reject the idea of the properties being returned. One of them, Jorge González Amores, is emphatic: “If they left the country, that means they weren’t interested in the building.”
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