Four cruise lines were condemned, Friday, by the American justice to pay nearly 450 million dollars.
Their fault: having used a port in Havana (Cuba), nationalized by the Cuban authorities in 1960.
The four cruise lines convicted are Carnival, MSC SA, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian.
Each will have to pay 109 million dollars, plus legal costs, to the American company Havana Docks.
It had been deprived of its rights to operate the port after the Castro revolution on the Caribbean island.
A 1996 law applied for the first time
The United States has applied an economic embargo against the island since 1962.
Democratic President Barack Obama, however, relaxed the rules, allowing cruise passengers to stop in Cuba in 2016, a decision later reversed by his Republican successor Donald Trump.
The four companies, whose liners stop in Cuba, "have made significant profits, in the order of several hundred million dollars each, from their illegal activities" in this port, according to the judge.
The judgment is not based on the embargo but on a law of 1996 remained a dead letter until then.
A measure that came into effect under Trump
With this law, Congress had wanted to discourage potential investors in Cuba by authorizing any American whose property had been seized by Fidel Castro's regime to prosecute those who profit from their use.
Successive American presidents blocked the application of this measure until Donald Trump decided, in 2019, to let it come into force.
A string of legal actions followed.
That concerning the four cruise passengers, now guilty of "trafficking" and "prohibited tourism", is the first to succeed.
They will be able to appeal this decision, but it could have major repercussions for the Cuban economy, which is going through its worst crisis since the 1990s.
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