US announces charges against former Cuba president Raul Castro over 1996 downing of planes

US PROSECUTORS HAVE announced charges against former Cuban president Raul Castro in the 1996 downing of civilian planes operated by Miami-based exiles as the Trump administration escalated pressure on the socialist government.

The indictment was related to Castro’s alleged role in the shoot-down of two small planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue.

Castro, now 94, was Cuba’s defence minister at the time.

The charges included murder and destruction of an aeroplane.

Acting attorney general Todd Blanche and other top Justice Department officials made the announcement in Miami at a ceremony to honour those killed in the shoot-down.

“For nearly 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice,” Blanche said.

“They were unarmed civilians and were flying humanitarian missions for the rescue and protection of people fleeing oppression across the Florida straits.”

Asked what lengths American authorities would go to bring Castro to face charges in the US, Blanche said: “There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way.”

The federal government, he said, indicts people outside the United States “all the time” and uses a variety of methods to bring them to justice.

Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel condemned the indictment and accused the US of lying and manipulating the events of 1996.

He called it “a political action without any legal basis” that only seeks to “bolster the case they are fabricating to justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba”.

President Donald Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since US forces captured the Cuban government’s long-time patron, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

After ousting Maduro, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.

Since Maduro’s capture, Trump has ratcheted up talk of regime change in Cuba after pledging earlier this year to conduct a “friendly takeover” of the country if its leadership did not open its economy to American investment and kick out US adversaries.

Trump’s first administration indicted Maduro on drug-trafficking charges and used that to justify removing him from power during a surprise military raid in January that whisked the Venezuelan leader to New York to face trial.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio today urged the Cuban people to demand a free-market economy with new leadership that he said will chart a new course in relations with the US.

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“In the US, we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people,” Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said in a Spanish-language video message.

“Currently, the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.”

Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos F de Cossio, lashed out at Rubio on X, saying he “lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously about Cuba and tries to justify the aggression he inflicts on the Cuban people”.

Rubio “knows full well that there is no excuse for such cruel and ruthless aggression”.

There was no indication Castro will be taken into US custody anytime soon.

He took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel Castro in 2006 before handing power to a trusted loyalist, Diaz-Canel, in 2018.

While he retired in 2021 as head of the Cuban Communist Party, he is widely believed to wield power behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, who previously met secretly with Rubio.

Last week, CIA director John Ratcliffe travelled to Havana for meetings with Cuban officials, including Castro’s grandson.

Two other senior State Department officials met with the grandson in April.

“The symbolic nature is absolutely crucial,” said Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, a former prosecutor at the US attorney’s office in Miami who handled national security cases and crimes involving Cubans.

“Even though Raul Castro will likely stay and die in Cuba, you can use the indictment as a pressure point, a tactical advantage, to extract other concessions like the release of prisoners or to keep Russia out,” she added.

Starting in 1995, planes flown by members of Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded by Cuban exiles, buzzed over Havana dropping leaflets urging Cubans to rise up against the Castro government.

The Cubans protested to the US government, warning that they would defend their airspace.

Federal Aviation Administration officials also opened an investigation and met with the group’s leaders to urge them to ground the flights, according to declassified government records obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

“This latest overflight can only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government,” an FAA official wrote in an email to her superiors after one intrusion in January 1996.

“Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.”

But those calls went unheeded and on 24 February 1996, missiles fired by Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets downed two unarmed civilian Cessna planes a short distance north of Havana, just beyond Cuba’s airspace.

All four men aboard were killed.