A group of US senators and congressmen from both parties introduced a bill on Thursday that seeks to prevent US courts from recognizing and granting rights to trademarks that were confiscated in Cuba.
“Any confiscation or seizure of assets by the Cuban regime is and always will be a criminal act that should not be rewarded by the United States government,” said Democratic Senator Bob Menéndez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and also a member of the Finance Committee in a statement that unveiled the initiative.
It is a project “to modify the prohibition of recognition by the courts of the United States of certain rights related to certain trademarks or trade names.”
Menéndez is accompanied in his intention by Republican Senator Marco Rubio; and Congressmen Darrell Issa (Republican) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Democrat).
Shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the Cuban government promulgated the First Agrarian Reform Law on May 17 of that year and proceeded to take possession of agricultural and livestock farms, and a year later, in 1960, it took carried out most of the nationalizations of property owned by United States citizens, a process that concluded in 1963.
“There is bipartisan support to protect Americans whose property was stolen by the Cuban regime,” Rubio said in the statement.
the case of rum
In the statement, the legislators cite as an example a dispute that dates back to 1994, when a US court granted the Cuba Ron company a US trademark, Havana Club, a rum that took the name of a recreational club confiscated in 1959 in the island.
At the same time as Cuba Ron was awarded, the Bacardí firm, a renowned rum manufacturer based in Puerto Rico, bought the original recipe and the brand from Havana Club, for which reason the Cuban company and the French company Pernod Ricard would be prohibited from commercializing and using the brand due to “illegal” confiscation by the Cuban government.
Rubio and Menéndez are supported by another six senators from both parties, without distinction.
Recently, other senators also presented, bicamerally, a project that seeks to drop the embargo economic and commercial that the US maintains against the communist government of the island, which dates from 1962 and has been reformed on different occasions.
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