Supreme Court Revives $1 Billion Exxon Suit Over Cuba Assets (1)

The Supreme Court sided with Exxon Mobil in its efforts to sue a Cuban conglomerate for operating oil and gas assets seized in 1960 following the country’s Communist Revolution.

In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the court held that, by taking the “highly unusual step” in the Helms-Burton Act of creating a cause of action that expressly applied against Cuba, Congress waived the sovereign immunity ordinarily afforded to foreign state-owned enterprises by the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.

“Congress does not ordinarily ‘authorize a suit against a sovereign with one hand, only to bar it with another,’” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, argued that waiving immunity was a high bar not met by the law. The majority, she said, had looked for an “abrogation lurking between the lines” Congress never intended.

The decision, along with another case decided earlier in the term reviving a lawsuit over use of seized docks in the Port of Havana, could mark a watershed moment for lawsuits against the Cuban government.

Although Congress authorized such suits in the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, Title III of that law allowed presidents to suspend liability. Every president had done so until 2019, when President Donald Trump lifted that bar.

Exxon is seeking compensation from Corporación CIMEX S.A., a state-owned conglomerate in Cuba, for its use of more than 100 confiscated service stations. The lawsuit stalled after the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit directed a lower court to reassess whether Corporación CIMEX was entitled to FSIA immunity.

The court on Tuesday reversed the DC Circuit and remanded the case back to the appellate court for further proceedings.

The case is Exxon Mobil Corp v. Corporación CIMEX S.A., U.S., No. 24-699, decided on 6/23/26.