END THE BLOCKADE, SEND AID TO CUBA 4MAI26
Defense neo-nazi fascist petie hegseth has been committing extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans, Colombians and Ecuadorians in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since last Summer, the latest murders being committed just last week. The corrupt fascist drumpf / trump-vance administration also illegally and immorally attacked Venezuela and kidnapped Pres Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores earlier this year. pres drumpf / trump also met with fascist war criminal vladimir putin in Alaska in 2025, refusing to honor the arrest warrant issued for him by the ICC for crimes involving kidnapped children from Ukraine. Not My pres drumpf / trump, NOT MY vp vance with their corrupt administration lead by Sec of Defense fascist petie hegseth and Sec of State fascist little markie rubio have also dragged America into an illegal and immoral war on Iran. This administration's justifications for their threats of action against Cuba are grossly hypocritical and the US Congress must prevent the US military from taking any action against Cuba. Please work with the Virginia congressional delegation to prevent American military action against Cuba.
Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Charges Former Cuban President Raúl Castro With Murder
What We’re Covering Today
Cuba: The Justice Department indicted Raúl Castro, the former president and defense minister of Cuba, on murder and conspiracy charges in the deaths of four people in 1996. Mr. Castro was charged along with five others in the case. Read more ›
Cuba’s Response: The charges stem from the downing of two planes operated by a Cuban exile group that followed months of diplomatic wrangling. Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said that his country had acted in self-defense after its airspace was repeatedly violated by “notorious terrorists.”
Pressuring Havana: The charges are an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government, and gets Secretary of State Marco Rubio closer to his long-held goal of transforming the country.
The indictment of Raúl Castro is an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on Cuba.
Alan FeuerFrances Robles and David C. Adams
Alan Feuer reported from New York, and Frances Robles and David C. Adams from Miami.
The Justice Department on Wednesday unsealed an indictment against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, charging him with murder and a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes.
The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government. It also accused five others involved in the downing of the planes.
The charges, which were built on an earlier case first filed in 2003, brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the powers of the American criminal justice system at a moment of high tension with Cuba and saddled him with a maximum penalty of life in prison.
They also laid the grounds for potential action by the military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.
The superseding indictment was secretly returned last month and was announced at a news conference in Miami by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
They accused Mr. Castro and the others, including former Cuban pilots, of killing four people who died when the Cuban military shot down two planes in 1996 run by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that used aircraft to look for Cubans fleeing the country by sea. Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were shot down, claiming that the organization had dropped anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights.
“My message today is clear,” Mr. Blanche said. “The United States and President Trump does not — and will not — forget its citizens.”
Echoing that theme, Mr. Quiñones said that Cuba’s Communist government had acted with impunity for decades, but that the indictment would finally hold some of its leaders accountable.
“Those who kill Americans,” he said, “cannot simply wait out American justice.”
When asked by reporters if the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action in Cuba, Mr. Blanche said that decision was up to Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team.
In the 30 years since the planes were downed, Cuban American lawmakers, exile activists, survivors of the episode and family members of the victims have called for Raúl Castro, who was the minister of defense at the time, to be criminally charged. But Mr. Blanche had little to say when asked by reporters why an indictment in the case was returned now.
“Believe me, the thing which is most true is that for 30 years that has elapsed since then, the delay in justice has been the biggest injustice that has taken place,” José Basulto, who ran Brothers to the Rescue, said in an interview this year.
Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, told The New York Times on Wednesday that the charges against Raúl Castro were an attempt by the Trump administration to create a pretext for military action against Cuba.
“I cannot call it another word than a circus — a circus they are now mounting as one more action to justify military aggression against Cuba,” Mr. Guzmán said in an interview.
He added that Brothers to the Rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military shot down its planes, and that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. authorities to stop the group’s flights over Cuba, including in a letter from Fidel Castro to President Bill Clinton, a point supported by declassified U.S. documents from the time.
“How many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action?” he asked.
While the investigation into Mr. Castro had been going on for weeks, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Quiñones chose to unseal the charges on Wednesday. It coincided with Cuban Independence Day, commemorating the end of the U.S. military occupation of the island in 1902.
The indictment of Mr. Castro came at a moment of rising crisis for Cuba as the country’s oil supplies for domestic use and power plants have been exhausted. It also followed an unusual visit by John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, who met with senior Cuban officials, including Mr. Castro’s grandson, about a week ago. In the talks, he warned the government that it had to make economic changes and stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts on its soil.
Jack Nicas contributed reporting.
President Trump told reporters on Wednesday just before boarding Air Force 1 to travel to Connecticut that he had no plans to escalate his campaign against the Cuban government after the Justice Department’s indictment of the country’s former president Raúl Castro.
“No, there won’t be escalation,” Trump said. “I don’t think there needs to be.”
“Look the place is falling apart, it’s a mess,” he added.
One of the survivors from the shooting down was at the announcement of the indictment of Raúl Castro. Sylvia Iriondo, 85, recalled being in an airplane with Jose Basulto, the pilot who founded Brothers to the Rescue, when he spotted smoke from one of the group’s two planes that had been shot down by Cuban fighters. “We’re next,” he told her. She pulled out a rosary as Basulto flew them to U.S. airspace.
Republicans who represent Florida on Wednesday stopped short of calling for U.S. military action to force regime change in Cuba. “I don’t think it’s going to take military action,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. He said President Trump did not want to put U.S. troops in harm’s way. “I think the people of Cuba are going to rise up,” he added.
The charges against former President Raúl Castro come during a period of extraordinary hardship in Cuba.
It has been in economic free-fall for several years, and has had several nationwide power outages. Food prices have soared, and the tourism industry has cratered.
The crisis worsened considerably this year when President Trump cut off much-needed oil shipments from Venezuela, after U.S. forces removed that country’s president and took control of its oil industry. Mr. Trump also imposed an effective blockade on fuel shipments to Cuba from any country.
Cuba ran out of jet fuel, and airlines canceled flights. Transportation has largely come to a standstill as black-market gas prices have risen.
Last week, the Cuban government said the country had run out of oil reserves. Its officials have lashed out at the United States, saying it has deliberately inflicted pain on Cuba and violated its sovereignty by blocking oil shipments.
Cuba produces oil domestically, but far less than what it needs to function. As a result, even Havana, the capital, has been experiencing blackouts that can last 24 hours.
Residents interviewed in Havana last weekend said people had resorted to banging pots and pans to protest the blackouts. That tactic, they said, usually resulted in power being restored — proving, in their view, that the government could control which neighborhoods got power and when.
People described a daily quest for food, since it was impossible to run a refrigerator long enough to freeze meat or keep food fresh. They described buying food in small, affordable daily increments: five eggs one day, a pound of pork the next, three pounds of chicken on the day after that.
On a recent Monday, the power was on for just one hour, said a woman who lives in Havana and who did not want her name published, fearing retribution from the police. Things were a little better the next day: The power stayed on for two hours.
Florida Republicans on Capitol Hill were calling on President Trump to seize Raúl Castro as he did Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader whom U.S. forces captured and brought to New York to face federal charges. “Pay attention, and look what happened to Maduro,” said Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district includes downtown Miami.
Edward Wong has reported on international news and foreign policy for more than two decades, and has covered three secretaries of state.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s parents emigrated from Cuba to the United States three years before Fidel Castro seized power through a Communist revolution in 1959.
They were looking for economic opportunities. Mr. Rubio’s father, Mario, eventually found work in Florida as a bartender, and his mother, Oriales, as a hotel maid, cashier and Kmart stock clerk.
Yet, Mr. Rubio talks about dismantling the Communist government with the same passion that galvanizes many political exiles who left the island after the revolution. The indictment of the Raúl Castro, 94, the patriarch of the family, is in line with Mr. Rubio’s enduring mission, and it is just the latest in a series of efforts by the U.S. government to weaken Havana that Mr. Rubio has supported or engineered.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba,” Mr. Rubio said in a brief video address on Wednesday that was directed at the Cuban people.
“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said in Spanish. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”
Within Mr. Trump’s cabinet, Mr. Rubio’s focus on Cuba stands out, but it is par for course in the Cuban American milieu of South Florida. There, fiery anti-Communist politics are the norm, and casual banter can revolve around the ways in which the United States might one day oust the leaders in Havana.
“Rubio emerges out of the anti-Cuban politics of Miami,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times last December.
Mr. Rhodes managed Mr. Obama’s policy of trying to restore, to a degree, U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. Mr. Rhodes discussed the policy at the time with Mr. Rubio, who was a U.S. senator representing Florida.
“He’s always been rooted in a regime-change policy toward Havana,” Mr. Rhodes said. “It’s core to his identity.”
Mr. Rubio was one of the architects of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuela, which resulted in U.S. forces seizing Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, and bringing him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. In 2020, the Justice Department got a grand jury indictment against Mr. Maduro.
The aggression against Venezuela was in part aimed at knocking down the pillars of Cuba’s Communist government. Venezuela was the main supplier of oil for Cuba, and the Trump administration has pressured the country’s new ruler, Delcy Rodríguez, an ally of Mr. Maduro, to halt shipments to the island. As a result, Cuba’s economy has come under greater strain than it has seen in decades.
In 2019, during the first Trump administration’s efforts to unseat Mr. Maduro by trying to encourage an uprising, Mr. Rubio told NPR that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a Communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.
Months ago, Mr. Rubio began speaking directly with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of Raúl Castro, to try to negotiate an economic opening with Cuba that would include some political concessions. U.S. officials were pushing in early March for the Castro family to remove President Miguel Díaz-Canel, which would allow the Trump administration to argue it had successfully engineered political change in Cuba, The New York Times reported.
At the time, U.S. officials were willing to tolerate the Castros staying in power behind the scenes as long as they agreed to guide the country through economic changes pushed by the Trump administration. But U.S. officials have grown impatient with the slow pace of negotiations and what they see as stubbornness on the part of the Castro family.
Republican lawmakers who have called on the Trump administration to exert more pressure on Cuba’s Communist government celebrated the indictment. “Today is a glorious day,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, Republican of Florida, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill.
Representative Carlos Giménez, another Florida Republican, said the charges against Raúl Castro send a clear message that Washington was “laser focused” on the Western Hemisphere. “We will not tolerate dictatorships in our hemisphere,” he added. “We will be fighting for the people.”
The indictment had bipartisan support locally, even though some Democrats questioned the highly publicized nature of the announcement. “It’s a great day no matter your party,” said Daniella Levine Cava, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, who is a Democrat.
She added: “Look, it was coldblooded murder. It was state sanctioned. It means too much to leave it be. You’ll have to pursue justice. It’s also a tremendous symbol for the future. Obviously, people are celebrating today, but they’re anxious to know how will this lead to change of the regime. Certainly, it’s not the end.”
In a short video addressed to Cubans on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that President Trump was offering them “a new path.”
Hours later, the Justice Department indicted Cuba’s former president, Raúl Castro, for having given orders to shoot down two small civilian planes in 1996. The indictment was part of a multipronged U.S. strategy to topple Cuba’s communist government, which has included threats from Mr. Trump that he will “take” the country.
But the latest U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba, including its attempts to control who leads the country, reflects a dynamic that is more than a century old. And the U.S. government’s decision to indict Mr. Castro on May 20 carries particular significance.
On May 20, 1902, the U.S. formally ended its military occupation of Cuba, which it had maintained in the years after a rout of Spanish colonial forces by a combination of U.S. troops and Cuban guerrillas who had been fighting an independence war for three decades. While other Spanish colonies like Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines became U.S. possessions, Cuba was granted independence.
Many Cubans “celebrated their independence to the tilt” at the time, said Michael Bustamante, who directs the Cuban American studies program at the University of Miami. “But it came with a big asterisk.”
There was more than one asterisk. The biggest was the Platt Amendment, which “basically authorized the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs going forward,” Dr. Bustamante said. Cuba was essentially forced to accept those terms or allow the U.S. military occupation to continue. During that era, U.S. business interests, particularly in sugar, began buying large plantations on the island.
Another asterisk was the granting of a perpetual lease over a strategic port in Cuba’s southeast that became Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
The terms on which the U.S. lifted its military occupation “gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility,” Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University who studies U.S. colonialism, wrote in his book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”
Before the Platt Amendment was repealed in 1934, the U.S. would militarily occupy Cuba twice more, stepping in largely to protect its economic interests. The amendment helped destabilize Cuba, Dr. Bustamante said, because landowners would drum up unrest to precipitate U.S. intervention and the replacement of democratically elected leaders they opposed.
The communist government that came to power in Cuba’s 1959 revolution eventually abandoned May 20 as an official independence day. The White House, in a statement on Wednesday commemorating Cuban independence, said that the current government represented a “direct betrayal of the nation their founding patriots bled and died for.”
The choice of May 20 would resonate for most Cubans, said Dr. Bustamante.
“In the context of broader foreign policy worldview where the Trump administration is pushing to reassert U.S. dominance — their words not mine — in the Western Hemisphere,” he said, “they are hearkening back to this moment when the U.S. did treat Cuba as its backyard.”
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, deflected the question when asked whether the Trump administration planned to bring Raúl Castro to Florida to stand trial, saying it was “a question that involves the president of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of State.”
Mirta Mendez, the sister of Carlos Costa, one of the pilots who was killed in the 1996 downing by Cuba of two American planes, said she had no idea that the U.S. attorney’s office had secretly revived the case. “None of us lost hope,” she said.
Maggie Alejandre-Khuly, 80, the sister of one of the Cuban Americans who were shot down on Feb. 24, 1996, was holding a copy of the indictment at the event at the Freedom Tower where the charges were announced. “It’s still bittersweet,” she said. “It’s good in that justice in our case seems to be progressing. It’s bitter in the sense that it’s taking 30 years and, you know, no good justice would ever be achieved unless we have our dead people back, which is impossible.”
President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba called the indictment against Raúl Castro “a political action, lacking any legal basis,” to build a case for potential military aggression against the island. He defended the 1996 shooting down of planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, saying Cuba “acted in legitimate self-defense within its jurisdictional waters, following successive and dangerous violations of our airspace by notorious terrorists.”
Cuba “did not act recklessly, nor did it violate international law,” Díaz-Canel said on social media. He turned the accusation back on Washington, saying U.S. forces had carried out extrajudicial killings during boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, would not say why the Justice Department decided to unseal the indictment against Castro today, since prosecutors had obtained it in late April.
“There’s a lot of factors that go into when a sealed indictment is unsealed, if ever,” he told reporters. He said that he didn’t care that some people were speculating the indictment might be used as a pretext for military intervention in Cuba.
The charges against Raúl Castro result from the 1996 shooting of two civilian Brothers to the Rescue aircraft that went down in international skies north of Cuba, an episode that followed months of diplomatic wrangling between the United States and Cuba over the organization’s flights.
In the early 1990s, thousands of Cubans migrated to the United States by sea, usually aboard rafts or other precarious homemade vessels. Brothers to the Rescue was a volunteer group of pilots who would fly over the Straits of Florida looking for stranded migrants and then alerting the U.S. Coast Guard.
Cuba and the United States ended a massive wave of migration by agreeing to turn back any Cubans caught at sea. After that, Brothers to the Rescue continued flying, but with a more provocative mission.
The organization, and its founder José Basulto, would fly over Cuba and drop leaflets with various messages, including excerpts from the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights. The Cuban government was furious and spent months complaining to the U.S. State Department, according to records posted on Tuesday by the National Security Archive, a research institute that collects declassified documents.
The records show that the Cuban government and the Clinton administration held several meetings discussing Mr. Basulto’s flights, with the Federal Aviation Administration demanding that Cuba provide evidence that its air space had been violated.
When an F.A.A. official learned that Mr. Basulto planned another flight, she warned colleagues, just two days before the doomed flight.
“In light of last week’s intrusions, this latest overflight can only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban government,” the official wrote.
“Worst-case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes and the F.A.A. better have all its ducks in a row.”
Two days later, after Mr. Basulto announced himself to Cuban air traffic control, the Cuban defense ministry scrambled two MiG fighter jets. The jets fired Soviet-made air-to-air missiles, bringing down the two northbound planes in international waters.
Three U.S. citizens and a U.S. resident, who had himself been a rafter rescued by the group, were killed. Mr. Basulto, who was aboard a third plane, escaped unharmed.
“I saw smoke on the right side of our plane,” Mr. Basulto said in a recent interview.
“I believed wholeheartedly that we were going to be next and fortunately it didn’t happen.”
The Cuban government declined to comment this week, except to share a social media post by the Cuban ambassador to the United States, Lianys Torres Rivera, with a link to the memos.
The records were compiled through a Freedom of Information Act request for a 2014 book, “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana,” by William LeoGrande, a Cuba scholar at American University, and Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive.
Mr. Basulto was in a hospital on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment regarding the F.A.A. documents.
In the past, the organization has denied violating Cuban air space that day, and said it was within its rights to fly in the area.
Raúl Castro is a former guerrilla who fought alongside his brother Fidel to topple the dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. He later became defense minister and took over as president after Fidel Castro became ill and stepped down. He will turn 95 on June 3.
One of the MiG pilots named in today’s superseding indictment, Lorenzo Pérez-Pérez, was first indicted in 2003. His brother, Francisco Pérez-Pérez, also a pilot, was indicted back then, too, but has since died.
Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, was vague when asked how he expected Raúl Castro to be brought to the United States to face charges, saying, “He will show up here by his own will or by another way.”
“We indict men outside of this country all the time, and there’s all kinds of different ways we can get them here,” he said.
The indictment of Raúl Castro is the latest step in the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign against Cuba — part of a broader effort by the president to topple the Cuban government.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment on Wednesday, charging Mr. Castro, the former president of Cuba, and five other people with murder and a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens.
Since retaking office, President Trump has made no secret of his desire to expand U.S. territory and oust leaders he dislikes. After the successful military operation in Venezuela and the so far unsuccessful efforts to secure Greenland or the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump has made it clear that Cuba is his next target.
For Mr. Trump, the interest in Cuba is not new. In 2011 and 2012, Trump Organization executives visited Cuba to scout a golf course, and in 2016, while running for president, Mr. Trump said Cuba “would be a good opportunity for investment.”
And even as he has derided Cuba as a “failed nation” in recent months, he has continued to talk up its geographical advantages.
“I think Cuba, in its own way, tourism and everything else, it’s a beautiful island, great weather,” Mr. Trump said in March.
This isn’t the first time federal prosecutors have drawn up an indictment against Raúl Castro. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida prepared a criminal indictment of Castro for drug trafficking, alleging that cocaine from the Medellín cartel was getting to the United States from Cuba, with express permission from the Cuban military. The draft indictment was leaked to the press in 1993, but the case was never brought to a grand jury.
It’s notable that one of the people who was not at the announcement was José Basulto, the founder of Brothers to the Rescue, who was on a third plane that day that got away. He fell ill yesterday and was in the hospital, his wife said.
One of the people who attended the announcement of the charges against Raúl Castro was Bryan Calvo, the mayor of Hialeah, Fla., the city with the highest percentage of Cuban exiles and their descendants. Calvo was born in December 1997, more than a year after the downing of the planes that is central to the charges. He said more needed to be done. “This is a web of individuals,” he said. “Obviously Castro is at the top of that web, but the guy is 94 years old, so what we need to see is a much broader effort in terms of the indictments and direct action.”
The Department of Justice said that if convicted, the defendants face a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment on the counts of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals. Raúl Castro and one of the pilots face up to five years in prison for each of the destruction of aircraft counts.
The setting for this announcement is highly unusual. It is rare for federal charges to be announced before an audience of so many people. Hundreds of dignitaries and guests are in attendance.
Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, told The Times that the Brothers to the Rescue group had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military shot down their planes, and that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. authorities to stop the group’s flights over Cuba, including in a letter from Fidel Castro to then-President Bill Clinton.
Then he questioned how the U.S. government would have reacted under similar circumstances. “How many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action?” he asked.
The crème-de-la-crème of South Florida politics is here, including mayors, local Cuban-American politicians and former prosecutors, some of whom had worked on previous efforts to indict Raúl Castro that never bore fruit. “It proves once and for all that it’s not justice delayed and it’s certainly not justice denied,” said Guy Lewis, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. “Maybe delayed a little bit, but certainly not denied.”
Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, told The New York Times on Wednesday that the indictment of Raúl Castro was an attempt by the Trump administration to create a pretext for military action against Cuba. “I cannot call it another word than a circus — a circus they are now mounting as one more action to justify military aggression against Cuba,” he said.
Reporting from Miami
Raúl Castro was Cuba’s defense minister for 49 years and also the country’s president for 12 years, serving until 2018, after his brother Fidel stepped down because of illness.
Raúl Castro is 94 and no longer holds any official title, but he still wields enormous power, experts say, particularly over the military, and he has had a hand in secret negotiations with the Trump administration over the current standoff between Havana and Washington.
Cuban state media still refers to him reverentially as “the leader of the Cuban Revolution” who, along with Fidel, helped to lead the 1959 uprising that toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator.
Raúl Castro is frail, has poor hearing and difficulty speaking, but he still attends important events and was last seen in public on May 1 wearing his military uniform at an International Workers’ Day parade.
Despite being known as a heavy drinker earlier in life with a penchant for shots of neat vodka (he studied in Moscow and was an admirer of the former Soviet Union), Raúl Castro has aged remarkably well, his former chief of staff, Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected to Florida by raft in 2002, told The New York Times.
“The fact remains that as long as he is alive, he will continue to be a decisive factor in the country’s trajectory,” Mr. Hidalgo said.
While Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, was the revolution’s charismatic leader, Raúl Castro seemed content to stay in the background. “Raúl and Fidel were dramatically different,” said Brian Latell, a former longtime Cuba analyst for the C.I.A. “Fidel was the director, he was the temperamental and creative one. Raúl did all the backstage work.”
After the revolution, it was Raúl Castro who built the new Revolutionary Armed Forces, which repelled the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the C.I.A. When Fidel Castro declared Cuba to be a Communist state in 1961, Raúl Castro did the heavy lifting to organize the Cuban Communist Party.
As defense minister under Fidel, Raúl Castro guided the creation of GAESA, an enormous military conglomerate that includes hotels, stores, gas stations and many other businesses. It is considered the most powerful economic force in Cuba.
Experts once regarded Raúl Castro as a potential change agent after he relaxed some of the Cuban government’s most rigorous communist economic policies, for example by allowing Cubans to buy and sell homes and vehicles. In 2015, he restored diplomatic relations with the United States and a year later welcomed President Barack Obama to Havana.
But he kept up the Communist Party’s tight political control over the island’s one-party system and maintained the repressive state security apparatus.
The victims in the downing of the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue planes included two pilots, Mario Manuel de la Peña, 24, and Carlos A. Costa, 29, who worked at the Miami airport. Their passengers were Armando Alejandre, 45, who was a Vietnam veteran, and Pablo Morales, 29, a Cuban exile who had been saved by Brothers to the Rescue himself and went on to volunteer for the group. Morales was the only one of the four men killed who was not an American citizen.
The indictment accuses Castro and five others of having “participated in a conspiracy that ended with Cuban military aircraft firing missiles” at civilian planes killing four people, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said.
“Nations and their leaders cannot be permitted to target Americans, kill them and not face accountability,” he added.
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the message of the indictment was “the United States and President Trump does not, and will not, forget its citizens.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche got a standing ovation from a crowded room of dignitaries, Cuban exiles, politicians, families of the victims and other guests even before he started to speak. After he announced the charges, people got up again and cheered him on.
Former President Raúl Castro of Cuba was charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft and four individual counts of murder, the acting U.S. attorney general, Todd Blanche, said.
“Today we are announcing an indictment charging Raúl Castro and several others with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals,” the acting attorney general of the United States, Todd Blanche, said, prompting a wave of applause.
The setting for the announcement of charges against Raúl Castro has a lot of significance in Miami. The Freedom Tower, built in 1925 as the headquarters of the Miami News newspaper, served as the Cuban Refugee Center from 1962 to 1974. It was the first stop for thousands of Cubans who fled the Castro government and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.
According to the order to unseal the indictment, one of the men charged with Raúl Castro is a retired Cuban Air Force pilot, Lt. Col. Luis Raúl Gonzalez Pardo, who was arrested in November in Florida. He was accused of lying about his military service for the communist government in Cuba on immigration forms.
He pleaded guilty in January to failing to admit his military record and is due to be sentenced on May 28 in Jacksonville federal court.
Federal charges have been filed against Raúl Castro, the former Cuban leader, and five Cuban MiG pilots in Florida, according to a court order unsealing a superceding indictment. Two pilots had already been indicted in 2003, but one of them has since died.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a rare direct appeal to the Cuban people in a video posted on Wednesday, the anniversary of their independence from Spain and U.S. military occupation, urging them to align with the Trump administration as it seeks to weaken the Cuban regime.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba,” Mr. Rubio said in the brief video address, which was reported on Wednesday by Axios before it was posted.
In the address, which was in Spanish with English subtitles and posted on the State Department’s YouTube channel Wednesday morning, Mr. Rubio mentions the former Cuban leader, Raúl Castro, around the one-minute mark. Mr. Castro, who also served as defense minister, was indicted by the Justice Department on Wednesday for having ordered the downing of two civilian planes in 1996. Four people were killed.
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has been fixated on Cuba for decades, blamed the country’s longstanding electricity and resource shortages on Mr. Castro and GAESA, the military-run conglomerate that controls most aspects of the country’s economy.
“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said in Spanish. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”
Cuba has been struggling with an energy crisis for more than two years because of crumbling infrastructure and a dwindling supply from its longtime benefactor, Venezuela. After the United States overthrew Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this year, it seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and imposed an effective blockade barring all foreign oil from reaching Cuba. The Cuban government said last week that its oil reserves had run dry.
In its second term, the Trump administration has ramped up efforts to isolate the country’s Communist government and draw it closer into the American orbit. Mr. Maduro’s ouster was seen in part as an effort to weaken Cuba.
Wednesday’s message is the first direct appeal Mr. Rubio has made to the people of Cuba. He has long been seen as a hawk on policy regarding the island nation and has made little secret of his hopes to topple or undermine its government.
On Monday, the Trump administration issued sanctions against some of Cuba’s top leaders, including military and party officials, in the hopes of further pressuring its government to overhaul its system.
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