Miami Judge Orders Shipyard to Pay $80 Million for Enslaving Cuban Workers in Curação
Americas, Fair Trade, Judicial Rulings, Law-US, Rights & Freedoms
A federal judge in Miami has ordered the Curação Drydock Company to pay $80 million in damages and fines for enslaving workers shipped to Curação from Cuba. The workers were reportedly forced to work up to 112 hours per week at just 3 cents (US$0.03) per hour. Curação is a dependency of the Kingdom of the Netherlands — home to both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court (ICC) and a leading light in diplomatic efforts to improve human rights conditions the world over.
According to the Christian Science Monitor:
The three men testified that they had been sent to Curaçao to work off Cuba’s multimillion-dollar debt to the Curaçao Drydock Company, a private company whose largest shareholder is the government of the Netherlands Antilles. Their passports were seized at the airport and they were rarely allowed to leave the shipyard complex, and only in groups with a minder.
The workers were also reportedly forced to work for up to 15 days without a break and subjected to hours of “videotaped speeches” by Fidel Castro, presumably an attempt to persuade them that their plight was a noble contribution to the homeland. A nephew of the Cuban leader, Manuel Bequer, has been cited as production manager for the firm.
Seth Miles, the lawyer who represented the enslaved men who brought the case, has said:
They faced the worst choice you can imagine: to continue being slaves not knowing if they would live or die because they were being treated so badly or to try to escape, knowing that even if they were successful it would be horrific for their families in Cuba…
The plantiffs’ lawyer has also said “Their kids have been kicked out of school, their relatives have lost their jobs, and neighborhood gangs harass their families.” The case appears to reveal a very backward application of proletarian labor philosophy, enslaving citizens for the benefit of the state, long a major point of critique for the powerful exiled Cuban community in Miami.
CSM also reports that:
The company has denied many of the allegations, though they admitted that the Cuban workers’ passports were seized and that their unpaid wages were deducted from the debt Havana owed the company. After failing to get the case thrown out on technical grounds, the firm fired their attorneys and abandoned the case.
The case is a function of the Alien Tort Claims Act, a US law which allows foreign nationals to sue non-US officials or entities in US federal courts for major violations of international humanitarian law. Cases brought to date have included torture, murder, efforts to crush democratic dissent and inhuman working conditions. While the US has not joined the ICC, the Alien Tort Claims Act is a major precedent for prosecution of human rights abuses internationally.
The US State Department position on modern slavery involves efforts to curb and punish human trafficking, noting: “Human trafficking is modern-day slavery, involving victims who are forced, defrauded, or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. While some victims of this crime are able to escape from involuntary servitude, many more are not able to break free on their own. They need help.”