These confiscations, worth over $7 billion today, comprise the “largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.”
That was yesterday.
Today, the Castro regime continues to confiscate businesses and properties -- albeit no longer of Americans thanks to U.S. sanctions.
We've seen a slew of Canadian and European businesses confiscated by the Castro regime in recent years; the illegal and compulsory confiscation of Cuban worker's wages; of "self-employment" activity; and even the confiscation of remittances through a byzantine foreign exchange mechanism.
And, unfortunately, these confiscations will continue tomorrow, so long as Cuba is ruled by an absolute and arbitrary dictatorship, without an independent judiciary, recourse and rule of law.
Excerpt from The Boston Globe:
What’s often forgotten... is that the embargo was actually triggered by something concrete: an enormous pile of American assets that Castro seized in the process of nationalizing the Cuban economy. Some of these assets were the vacation homes and bank accounts of wealthy individuals. But the lion’s share of the confiscated property—originally valued at $1.8 billion, which at 6 percent simple interest translates to nearly $7 billion today—was sugar factories, mines, oil refineries, and other business operations belonging to American corporations, among them the Coca-Cola Co., Exxon, and the First National Bank of Boston.
