The Fourth Circuit upheld the Havana Club renewal at the center of Bacardi's stolen-trademark dispute. The holding is narrower than the outcome suggests.
According to Ramón Arechabala's 2004 Senate testimony, armed men took his family's distillery in Cárdenas on December 31, 1959; the family had made Havana Club rum there since 1878. Pernod-Ricard and the Cuban government have maintained the family abandoned the U.S. mark; Bacardi and the family dispute that account. The family's registration lapsed by 1974, Cubaexport registered the mark in 1976, and Bacardi acquired the remaining rights in 1995.
The APA Question
Bacardi & Co. v. Squires (4th Cir. June 16, 2026) was an Administrative Procedure Act (APA) case. Cubaexport wired its combined Section 8/9 renewal fee in December 2005 without the specific Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) license Congress made mandatory in 1998 for marks tied to confiscated Cuban property. OFAC denied the license, and the USPTO refused renewal and refunded the fee in 2006. Cubaexport's petition to the Director was then stayed while it litigated the denial, losing in the D.C. Circuit in 2011. A decade later, OFAC issued a license expressly authorizing the 2005 payment, which the Director treated as effective as of December 14, 2005. The panel held that 31 C.F.R. § 515.502(a) permits a license to validate an already-effected transaction it specifically identifies, and that § 515.203(c) supplies the legal effect.
Two Notes from the Opinion
- Footnote 10 limits the holding. Timely payment is "necessary but not sufficient" for renewal, and "the Director may still refuse renewal on other grounds." The panel decided the fee question, no more.
- Bacardi's challenge to the decade of agency delay was forfeited rather than resolved. The panel identified two paths not taken: challenging the delay while it ran, or prejudicial delay after final action.
An op-ed by Kyle Vallecillo in IPWatchdog, Inc argues for those "other grounds": the lawful-use gloss on use in commerce that the TTAB applies to refuse marijuana marks, and TMEP 1613.11's listing of trade embargoes as excusable nonuse, which he notes is the only example on that list without a supporting decision.
The Forward Question
The forward question is untested. The next renewal came due July 27, 2026. The No Stolen Trademarks Honored in America Act (Pub. L. 118-137, Dec. 1, 2024) extended Section 211's bar to executive-branch entities, but Section 211 addresses assertions of common-law and Section 44(b) and (e) rights, and no court has construed whether granting a Section 8/9 filing is such an assertion. The Director's disposition would be the first application of the amendment, and under the court's 2024 ruling that the Lanham Act does not preclude APA review, it would itself be reviewable.
Read the Fourth Circuit's opinion in Bacardi here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2026/06/16/bacardi_and_company_limited_v._john_squires.pdf
Read the IPWatchdog, Inc op-ed here: https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/07/20/congress-said-no-to-stolen-trademarks-uspto-said-yes/