Today, an indictment aimed at former Cuban president Raul Castro was unsealed. Castro and five others have been indicted by a grand jury in Florida of crimes related to the downing of planes containing U.S. citizens back in 1996.
The federal criminal charges against the 94-year-old Castro — brother of the late Fidel Castro and widely seen as one of Cuba’s most powerful figures — mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Cuban government. Castro served as president of Cuba from 2008 to 2018 and as the top official of the country’s Communist Party from 2011 to 2021…
Castro was charged in South Florida with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder and two counts of destruction of aircraft, the court docket shows. The exact contents of the indictment aren’t clear: A judge on Wednesday granted a motion to unseal a superseding indictment against Castro, but the indictment itself has not yet been made public.
The other defendants include a fighter pilot who was initially charged in connection with the 1996 shootdown more than two decades ago.
If this sounds vaguely familiar then you may be remembering a previous post I wrote about this back in February. That’s when four Cuban members of congress sent President Trump a letter making the case that he should indict Raul Castro over this incident. Here’s part of what the letter, signed by Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar and Nicole Malliotakis, had to say about Castro’s responsibility for the 1996 incident.
It is our understanding, based on public information, that on February 24, 1996, Raul Castro ordered a Cuban Mig fighter jet to engage and obliterate two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft over international waters. Flying those planes were three American citizens, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Pena and Pablo Morales, a legal U.S. resident. Those four brave men were flying small civilian aircraft over the Straits of Florida to identify and help rescue Cuban rafters making the perilous escape from totalitarian Cuba. We believe that the following facts are instructive regarding Raul Castro’s complicity in the crime:
- Raul Castro Ruz is the brother of the late tyrant Fidel Castro and the former Director of the Cuban Secret Services, Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Air Force, President of the Ministry of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and Deputy Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party.
- In an audio recording of a conversation which took place just weeks after the shooting and obtained by The Miami Herald, Raul Castro can be heard discussing giving the orders to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft: In the recording, Raul Castro can be heard saying: “I told them [Cuban Mig pilots] to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, ”and “Knock them down into the sea when they reappear.”…
- On August 21, 2003,a U.S. grand jury indicted the two Cuban fighter pilots, Lorenzo Alberto Perez-Perez and Francisco Perez-Perez, and their commanding general, Ruben Martinez Puente, then head of the Cuban Air Force, on murder charges for the 1996 shoot down ordered by Raul Castro. They were charged with four counts of murder, one count of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals and two counts of destruction of aircraft…
We believe unequivocally that Raul Castro is responsible for this heinous crime; it is time for him to be brought to justice.
In short, back in ’96, Raul Castro was in charge of the Cuban air force. So he’s not being accused in a buck-stops-here sense. He’s being accused because he personally gave the order that led to their deaths. And as mentioned, there is some contemporaneous evidence that he admitted it.
As a practical matter, trying Raul Castro for these murders seems unlikely given that there is no chance Cuba would ever ship him off to Florida for a trial. However, the significance of this indictment may not be dependent on what Cuba does but on what the U.S. does.
Remember that Venezuelan strong man Nicolas Maduro was also indicted for narco-terrorism and other crimes. There seemed little chance he would ever see the inside of a U.S. court at the time, but then things changed. Part of the justification for going in an seizing Maduro was the indictments against him.
In the past couple months there have been multiple reports that the U.S. was looking to make a deal with Cuba, but not with its current president who is a communist die-hard. Instead, Raul Castro was seen as the real power-broker and several conversations were held with people connected to him, including his grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro aka The Crab.
The meeting last Friday itself marks a diplomatic breakthrough because it’s the first time a U.S. government plane has touched down since President Obama visited a decade ago in an effort for rapprochement…
A senior State Department official told Axios that multiple meetings took place but would not name the participants, except for one —Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of Castro…
The U.S. officials impressed on the Castro regime that “the Cuban economy is in free fall and that the island’s ruling elites have a small window to make key U.S. backed reforms before circumstances irreversibly worsen,” the official told Axios.
The Trump administration has been applying pressure to Cuba, but so far no deal to liberalize the economy, release political prisoners and allow for real elections has been made. One way to see this indictment is as an attempt by the administration to crank up the pressure. Cuba is well aware of what happened to Maduro given that many of Maduro’s top guards killed in the U.S. raid were Cubans. The not-so-subtle message being sent here is that something similar could happen to Raul Castro. He, like Maduro, could spend his remaining years (he turns 95 next month) in a Florida prison awaiting trial.
Trump has hinted several times that he would turn his full attention to Cuba once things had been resolved in Iran. Obviously that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe he’s decided to do two things at once or maybe this is also a signal that he plans to wrap up the Iran situation fairly soon.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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