Florida shipping companies settle lawsuits for use of Port of Mariel in Cuba
Two major Florida-based ocean transport and shipping companies, Crowley Maritime and Seaboard Marine, have settled lawsuits brought by a Miami family over the use of the Port of Mariel facilities in Cuba, which were built on property confiscated decades ago by the Cuban government.
The settlement closed out years of litigation under Title III of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, commonly known as the Helms-Burton Act, which gives U.S. nationals the right to sue anyone who “traffics” in property seized by the Cuban government after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The right to sue under Title III had been suspended since 1996, but President Donald Trump reinstated it in 2019, paving the way for dozens of lawsuits.
Seaboard Marine, a Miami subsidiary of Seaboard Corporation, settled in January 2026. The lawsuit against Crowley Maritime, based in Jacksonville, was dismissed in late April, after an initial agreement reached in February. The terms of the agreements are confidential, according to court documents.
At the center of both lawsuits was Odette Blanco de Fernandez, the only surviving heir of the Blanco Rosell family, the original owners of Maritima Mariel, a company with port facilities in Mariel Bay, on Cuba’s northern coast, and Azucarera Mariel, which held thousands of acres around the bay. In September 1960, Fidel Castro’s government published a decree ordering the confiscation of all of it without compensation.
The Blanco Rosell siblings fled Cuba and became U.S. citizens. Decades later, with the help of the disgraced Brazilian company Odebrecht, the Cuban military conglomerate known as GAESA developed the port into a modern container terminal and a special development zone, partially on land previously owned by the Blanco Rosell family.
The settlements, first reported by the U.S-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, are notable because most goods sold to Cuba from the United States, including fuel sold to private businesses, pass through the Port of Mariel.
For years, Crowley and Seaboard have shipped products to Cuba, including chicken and other supplies authorized by law – like food and medicines– or covered by exceptions in the embargo regulations. But the fact that some trade with Cuba is authorized didn’t sway the judges in the cases.
The Helms-Burton Act contains very few exceptions in its definition of “trafficking” in confiscated property. Seaboard, for example, claimed its activities fell under the “lawful travel” exception, which excludes “transactions and uses of property incident to lawful travel to Cuba, to the extent that such transactions and uses of property are necessary to the conduct of such travel.”
But the federal appeals court for the Eleventh Circuit, based in Atlanta, ruled that trade and travel are two different things and that Seaboard “delivered commercial goods to Cuba; it did not engage in ‘lawful travel.’”
After years of litigation, the Trump’s administration hardened Cuba policy seems to have sped up the agreements. American Airlines and the Spanish hotel chain Iberostar have also reached similar agreements to settle separate lawsuits over the use of the international airport in Havana and a hotel in Santiago de Cuba.