Federal prosecutors secured an indictment against former Cuban communist dictator Raúl Castro over the country’s fatal 1996 attack on a Cuban-American exile group, officials announced Wednesday.
The brother of late dictator Fidel Castro and five others are charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of an aircraft and murder over the incident, Department of Justice (DOJ) leaders said at a Florida press conference. A group called Brothers to the Rescue was helping exiles flee communist “oppression” using civilian aircraft before Raúl Castro and the co-defendants orchestrated their deaths, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
Castro “authorized and oversaw a military chain of command” that led to military jets blowing up two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft over international waters without warning, killing four Americans, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones said. The prosecutor added that the case became “a priority” to him after President Donald Trump appointed him in 2025, leading him to reopen it.
“My message today is clear: the United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens,” Blanche said, prompting a crowd to applaud.
“For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in this country … for acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens,” Blanche said.
Castro stepped down from the presidency in 2018 but is still regarded as influential among the ruling communist party, CBS News reported. His brother, Fidel, died in 2016 after leading a communist revolution and ruling the nation for decades.
Cuba refuses to extradite criminal defendants and convicts to the U.S. The policy earned the country a “state sponsor of terrorism” sanction from the Trump administration. Blanche did not elaborate on how the U.S. would bring Castro into an American courtroom.
Trump has also pressured Cuba with oil sanctions and threatened to “take” the country in March without elaborating.
Castro’s indictment makes the statement that “the United States government has not forgotten these innocent men who were shot out of the sky,” Blanche told his audience.
The Cuban Embassy in the U.S. called the Brothers to the Rescue story a “hoax” in a Tuesday X post, claiming that “diplomatic and institutional channels” were “exhausted before tensions escalated in the airspace.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in an X post the indictment was “a political action, devoid of any legal basis, that seeks solely to pad the the dossier they are fabricating to justify the folly of a military aggression against [Cuba],” according to a Daily Caller News Foundation translation.
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