The Miami Herald reported this week that the off-shore investment group Clarinbridge is seeking a US Treasury License to buy claims against the Cuban government for American properties expropriated in the 1960s.
Since 2008, the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) must license any effort by owners of US-certified claims against Cuba to sell them to heirs or foreign buyers. So, we have to wait and see what OFAC says about the Clarinbridge overture. This could represent a real breakthrough on one of the core justifications for our comprehensive sanctions against Cuba. Perhaps more importantly, the effort would mean that a large group of claimants -- perhaps as much as 85 percent -- would be able to settle their claims and walk away.
Tim Ashby, the former US Commerce Department official who represents Clarinbridge and who has written extensively about settlement of US property claims, says that lots of claimants would gladly accept partial payment for these longstanding claims, if only to get some kind of favorable result after four decades.
Ashby has indicated that as far back as the 1990s some claimants began negotiating settlements but were dissuaded by political pressure. That's a shame, if true. After all this time, they should be free to decide for themselves what's right. It's their property, after all.
Others don't see any up side to this effort, arguing, like Jaime Suchlicki of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, that no agreement with a Castro government can lead to a stable and satisfactory solution. Suchlicki said the Clarinbridge effort "is a creative idea, but can you trust the Cuban government not to confiscate these investments again?" He may be pointing to the pro-sanctions crowd mantra that Cuba can't be trusted to meet debt obligations. That's irrelevant here. The point is that US claimants can resolve their claim -- if they want to -- at long last. If the Cuban Government then fails to meet whatever bargain they make with Clarinbridge, that's Clarinbridge's problem. It's called risk.
(In any case, the news isn't all that bad for Cuba's creditors. Objective observers note that Cuba seems to be coming out of the liquidity crisis that sparked a troubling hiatus in payments to some foreign exporters. With the end of the global downturn, Cuba's economy is expected to rebound and post modest growth in 2010.)
Anyone who would like to see the US-Cuba relationship get easier instead of harder for a change should hope for a solution like Clarinbridge is proposing. Let's see how OFAC sees the issue.