Little did Mario Echevarria know, growing up, that the site of his father’s cattle and charcoal business on a cay north of Cuba would one day become a jewel in the Communist island’s tourism industry.
Now 91, stooped and gray-haired, Mr. Echevarria is seeking damages against Expedia Group, the travel booking giant, for failing to obtain his permission when reserving rooms in hotels built on Cayo Coco, land confiscated from his family in 1960.
Testifying in Miami federal court last week, he was asked who authorized the bookings.
“That was given to them by the dictatorship,” he said.
The civil trial is the second in the past 18 months against Expedia, whose lawyers argue the company believed it was acting legally. The claims stem from a section of a 1996 law that lets U.S. citizens — including Cubans who were not Americans at the time — accuse companies of having illegally “trafficked” in assets seized without compensation.
Expedia entered Cuba in 2017, after President Barack Obama issued new rules letting American hotel chains operate there.
The lawsuit is one in a surge by Cuban families making claims over confiscated assets, dating back to the beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and comes as President Trump intensifies a pressure campaign on the island.
These claims pit the historical demands of Cuban exiles against the interests of corporations that have tried to navigate the island’s market amid volatile U.S. policy. During his second term, Mr. Trump has oscillated between wanting to work with Cuba’s government and developing plans to overthrow it, all while expanding sanctions.
Mr. Trump took a hard-line stance toward Cuba in his first term, including by opening the door to the current lawsuits. He did that by ending a decades-long suspension of part of the 1996 law, the Helms-Burton Act, which Cuba calls an assault on its sovereignty. Since then, the law has been used to sue various businesses, including cruise lines, energy companies and mining operations.
Forty to 50 lawsuits have been filed in U.S. federal courts, legal experts note, with cases reaching the Supreme Court.
In 2025, a Miami federal jury awarded almost $30 million to Mr. Echevarria in damages related to three hotels on Cayo Coco where Expedia and its affiliate sites operated.
A judge set aside the jury verdict, saying Expedia couldn’t be held liable for its subsidiaries. The case is under appeal. Expedia lawyers declined to comment.
The latest trial against Expedia involves bookings at four other hotels on Cayo Coco as well as the San Carlos Hotel in Cienfuegos, on Cuba’s south coast. All had been operated by a Spanish hotel chain, Meliá, which quit Cuba this summer. Although the chain did not cite U.S. sanctions as a factor, experts said they most likely contributed to the decision.
The families seek damages calculated to the market value of the properties, collectively estimated at $82 million.
Maricela Mata, 66, told the jury how she and her brother were born in the San Carlos Hotel, which her family owned and lived in. In 1981, she said, “the Communists told us we had to leave because the hotel was going to be renovated.” The family was never allowed back.
Esther Echevarria, 88, Mario’s sister-in-law, told the jury that when her family moved to Cayo Coco as a girl (her father rented property from the Echevarrias), the cay was all inhospitable mangroves, infested with mosquitoes and sandflies. “There was nothing, nothing there at all, just the charcoal makers,” she said.
After the authorities took the land, she said, her father resorted to selling water and bread nearby. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the government began developing the land for tourism.
Expedia’s lawyers argued they “did not knowingly and intentionally traffic” in the property, as they were unaware the hotels were on confiscated land.
On the stand, a former Expedia manager, Veronica Cassano, said her superiors never instructed her about the Helms-Burton law.
She described meetings with high-level Cuban officials, and said she did not have any conversations with Expedia about Cayo Coco’s historical ownership.
Santosh Aravind, a lawyer for Expedia, told the court that such meetings were a necessary and legitimate part of setting up operations in Cuba, where the state owns all hotels. Furthermore, this was done with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. Treasury Department, he said, noting that one meeting with a senior Cuban official took place at top U.S. diplomat’s residence.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers accused Expedia of playing fast and loose with U.S. rules, which permit travel to Cuba only under 12 authorized categories, none of which are resort tourism. They described Cayo Coco as a stretch of pristine beaches, hundreds of miles from Havana and home to a dozen modern hotels.
“There’s not a church, not a school, not a stadium, no housing for Cubans, and only one medical clinic for foreigners,” said one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Jorge Mestre. “It’s fun in the sun, it’s bars and beach.”
Ordinary Cubans who do not work in the hotel sector, they added, are forbidden entry to the cay.
