DOJ indicts Raúl Castro over fatal 1996 civilian planes’ shooting

MIAMI — The Justice Department indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro on Wednesday in connection with the 1996 shooting of two civilian planes that killed four Cuban exiles.

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Castro, 94, who is the brother of the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro , is being charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, murder and destruction of aircraft, according to acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Five other men, who were Cuban fighter pilots involved in the shooting, were also indicted.

The charges were announced during a news conference in front of Miami’s Freedom Tower, a symbol for Cuban Americans who have left the communist country — it’s referred to as “the Ellis Island of the South” — and on May 20, the date recognized as the Cuban Independence Day.

“Raúl Castro and five co-defendants participated in a conspiracy that ended with Cuban military aircraft firing missiles at those civilian planes and killing four Americans. Those are the allegations returned by a federal grand jury,” Blanche said.

According to the indictment , all orders to kill by the Cuban military traveled through a chain of command, “with Castro Ruz and Fidel Castro as the final decision makers.”

The announcement was met with loud cheers from the crowd in downtown Miami.

During the news conference officials also honored the four Cuban American men — three U.S. citizens and one a U.S. legal resident — who died aboard the civilian planes downed by the Cuban Air Force o n Feb. 24, 1996. At that time, Castro was Cuba’s defense minister.

The civilian planes belonged to Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded in 1991 by Cuban American pilot José Basulto and other exiles who were opposed to the Cuban government. The group would fly over the waters between Cuba and Florida with the aim of rescuing Cubans who had left the communist country in makeshift rafts. But they also sometimes penetrated Cuban airspace, according to declassified U.S. record , which cite an official warning from the Federal Aviation Administration about the group’s “taunting” of the Cuban government.

During one of Brothers to the Rescue’s missions, two of their planes were shot down by a Cuban MiG-29 in international airspace .

Cuba has repeatedly claimed the planes were violating Cuban airspace. But reports from the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that Armando Alejandre, Carlos Alberto Costa, Mario Manuel de la Peña and Pablo Morales “ died as a consequence of direct actions taken by agents of the Cuban State in international airspace ” and “ that Cuba acted without using standard interception procedures .”

The Clinton administration and Congress swiftly condemned Cuba’s actions at the time, leading to sanctions and the conviction of a man accused of giving Cuba information about Brothers to the Rescue’s missions.

Thirty years later, the incident remains one of the most politically charged episodes in modern U.S.-Cuba relations. Cuban American lawmakers, exile activists and family members of the victims have long called for Castro to be criminally charged in the U.S.

Blanche told NBC’s Tom Llamas on Wednesday that law enforcement has been focused on the incident “for a long time.”

“We were able to recently get the evidence and be in the right situation to be able to indict,” Blanche said. He declined to get into the specific details of the evidence present to the grand jury.

Relatives of the men who were shot down attended the indictment’s announcement.

“We are overly hopeful and thankful that finally our children are looked at as human beings who were murdered under a dictatorship who extended their tentacles to international waters to kill American citizens,” said Miriam de la Peña, the mother of Mario Manuel de la Peña, “and that cannot be allowed.”

Cuba is not expected to extradite Castro to the U.S., and most indicted foreign leaders are not brought to the country to face charges. But Blanche hinted to the possibility of U.S. action in Cuba when he told reporters there was a warrant for Castro’s arrest, “so we expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way.”

“We welcome him to come to Miami and stand up to a judge and stand up to a jury in this country and address those charges,” Blanche told Llamas.

The Cuban government strongly condemned Castro’s indictment Wednesday afternoon, with President Miguel Díaz-Canel accusing the U.S. on social media of “ lying and manipulating the events ” related to the 1996 incident.

Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart, R-Fla.; Carlos Giménez, R-Fla.; Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., and María Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., wrote a letter to the Justice Department in February calling for Castro’s indictment. The four lawmakers of Cuban descent celebrated Wednesday’s news and said it was the “ first step ” in bringing Castro to justice.

In Cuba, Castro continues to wield influence despite stepping down as president in 2018 and as secretary of the Communist Party in 2021. Announcements of nationwide events to celebrate Castro’s 95th birthday on June 3 went out on Wednesday ahead of the indictment.

Indictment amid U.S. pressure

Castro’s indictment comes as the Trump administration has been pressuring the Cuban government to implement political and economic changes, even threatening potential military action.

President Donald Trump fixed his sights on Cuba’s nearly seven-decade communist regime at the beginning of the year, following the U.S. military raid on Venezuela and the capture of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

On Tuesday, Trump said that Cuba “really needs help,” pointing out that “they can’t turn on the lights, they can’t eat.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the Cuban people directly for the first time on Wednesday. In a video message in Spanish, he said they were “going through unimaginable hardships.”

“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,” Rubio said.

Díaz-Canel responded to Rubio’s message on social media, saying in Spanish that the Cuban people’s “anti-imperialist sentiment is one that every subsequent generation has felt deepen amid new and constant threats to the independence and sovereignty of the Homeland.”

After the fall of Maduro, a close ally of the Cuban government, the Trump administration cut the flow of Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba. Oil reserves began to dwindle, creating fuel shortages and resulting in recurrent power outages across Cuba .

In Havana, residents told NBC News on Monday that fuel shortages have become so dire that rolling blackouts often last more than 20 hours a day. The lack of power is also leaving residents without water access, since municipal pumping systems and filtration plants need electricity to function.

“This situation needs a solution right now,” Mairobis Yanet said in Spanish. “There are so many issues: the electricity, the water, the food — everything. The problems here affect absolutely everything.”

The Cuban government has denounced the Trump administration’s recent actions as an attempt to break the island’s resistance and force a transition under U.S. interests.

Havana resident Marcelino Fuentes echoed some of the Cuban government’s sentiments.

“They are trying to attack us ... by suffocating us,” Fuentes said in Spanish, referring to the fuel blockade and economic sanctions. “It’s an act of barbarism and they have claimed a series of rights they do not possess, because Trump is not the owner of the world.”

Carmen Sesin reported from Miami, Nicole Acevedo from New York, Ryan Reilly and Gary Grumbach from Washington and Orlando Matos from Havana.