Failed efforts to find oil off Cuba’s northwestern coast led the Castro government to turn to old friends in Moscow.

Russian state oil giant Zarubezhneft currently has an exploration concession off Cayo Santa María in north-central Villa Clara province in an area 330 km east of Havana labeled Block L.

Zarubezhneft is planning to invest nearly $126 million in the venture, stressing its commitment in helping the Cubans. It has also been stringent in avoiding complications with the U.S. trade embargo by choosing a shallow-water rig that has no American-made components.

While that means Zarubezhneft will probably not encounter problems with U.S. authorities over its rig, a small team of Miami attorneys headed by Nicolás Gutiérrez wants to challenge the company’s Cuba presence on behalf of its clients: descendants of Cuban exiles and U.S. nationals who invested in pre-Castro Cuba oil concessions.

Already, some are dismissing Gutiérrez’s plans.

“At some point, this group may win a judgment in a Florida court against Zarubezhneft, but it will only be a hunting license,” said University of Nebraska professor Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, who’s been following Cuba’s quest for oil.

He opposes U.S. statutes that allow lawsuits against foreign entities dealing with Cuba, noting that Gutiérrez and his clients “could extort people who were doing business” on the island.

Gutiérrez is best known for representing clients who filed claims under Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which bars foreign investors from “trafficking” in property confiscated by the Castro regime after 1959.

Some years back, Gutiérrez sued a group of international resort chains, including Spain’s Sol Meliá, Jamaica’s Superclubs and France’s Club Med for building or running resorts on beachfront property previously held by a Cuban exile family, the Sánchez-Hills.

This time around, Gutiérrez wants to show the Russians that Helms-Burton doesn’t just apply to confiscated onshore properties but also to 1950s-era Cuban oil concessions suspended by the Castro regime, including offshore areas.

Gutiérrez and his team plan to use an unlikely group of clients, shareholders of a 1950s oil exploration firm called TransCuba, to do so. TransCuba was the largest contiguous oil concession holder in Cuba by the late 1950s, trading on both the New York and Havana stock exchanges. Before then, various Cuban oil concessions were held by an outfit called the Cuban Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust (CVOVT).

“TransCuba earned a 50% interest in all of CVOVT’s concessions in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment and other terms to invest certain amounts and maintain the concessions active,” said a member of the Gutiérrez legal team who spoke to CubaNews on condition he not be identified.

“Later, many acres were farmed out to companies like Cuban Stanolind, Sulgraves and others. TransCuba held a 50% working interest in 15.4 million acres held under concession by the CVOVT.”

The firm was eventually confiscated by Fidel just after the revolution, rendering its stock worthless. TransCuba stock certificates are currently being sold on eBay as pre-Castro souvenirs, while current holders of both those shares and those of CVOVT are on the Foreign Claim Settlement Commis-sion’s certified claimant list in Washington.

“Mineral rights have a well-accepted and legally recognized force majeure clause which generally allow noncompliance with contract terms when there is a greater force that prevents it, and this would also stop the clock on the concession period from running, or expiring,” said the Miami lawyer. “Illegitimate government intervention and illegal confiscation of assets [are] precisely [that] greater force."

In the mid-1990s, Gutiérrez helped set up a Florida subsidiary of TransCuba and transferred its Helms-Burton rights to that subsidiary, letting it put foreign oil companies “on notice” of their alleged illegal exploration activities in Cuba.

“We informed the U.S. State Department, OFAC and the New York Comptroller’s Office [which still has custody of TransCuba’s frozen assets] accordingly, and then notified several of the corresponding foreign partners of the Cuban regime in TransCuba’s stolen properties, such as Genoil (Great Britain), Beau Canada ,Taurus (Sweden) and Petrobras (Brazil), among others,” he said.

Petrobras once operated on Block L.

“On behalf of another similarly situated client, Consolidated Oil and Gas, Total (France) and Sherritt (Canada) were put on notice with Sherritt sued in federal district court up through the appellate level,” the lawyer continued. “Furthermore, the National Association of Cuban Mineral and Petroleum Rightholders was formed to defend the interests of Cuba’s pre-confiscation legitimate owners, in a more generalized united front.”

That group includes Diaz-Masvidal, Leyte Vidal, Gutiérrez Valladon and other prominent Cuban exile families

As before, such Helms-Burton lawsuits have not proceeded under Title III because the president due to foreign policy concerns has leeway to suspend its enforceability every six months. And that’s exactly what has happened ever since its enactment during the Clinton administration.

However, Title IV, which is enforced by the U.S. State Department, is non-suspendable and bars such foreign executives and their family members from being granted visas to enter the United States.

Gutiérrez has tried to use Title IV in the past to pressure these companies into legal settlements with varying results, due to occasional lax State Department enforcement.

“Sherritt eventually prevailed in court, on technical jurisdictional grounds, since their U.S. and Cuban operations were adequately insulated from each other by various corporate firewalls,” said the lawyer. “Genoil and Beau Canada offered us Title IV settlements, which we deemed too low, given our large number of shareholders.”

With this track record, Gutiérrez’s team appears confident it can go after Zarubezhneft on Title IV grounds. His legal team is armed with a CVOVT concession map from 1957 which allegedly includes Block L, as well as other onshore and offshore areas of Cuba.

“We could absolutely put the Russian firm on notice that any mineral activity conducted on that block would be considered trafficking in stolen property as per Helms-Burton,” said the lawyer.

Jorge Piñón, a Cuba oil expert with the University of Texas, dismisses the significance of these pre-Castro era offshore concessions.

“I do not believe that the pre-Castro government ever gave a deepwater offshore oil and gas exploratory concession. They could not have done so anyway the technology was not available at the time,” he said in a phone interview from Austin.

However, as shown on the CVOVT map, such concessions still included deepwater areas of Cuba, especially along the island’s southern coast.

Assuming this legal battle heats up, Gutiérrez hopes to get access to TransCuba assets in the United States to help cover costs.

“The company has assets in New York that have been frozen for decades and could be used to defend its property from traffickers, if it convinces the U.S. courts or the politicians to release said monies,” said the attorney.

Time will tell if Zarubezhneft executives will give in to a Title IV suit, since that firm is not known to hold U.S. interests.