WASHINGTON — Activist leaders defended Cuba on Thursday for killing Americans with aircraft decades ago while responding to a new U.S. indictment over the attack.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) gathered supporters at its new “Liberation Center” venue on H Street Northeast for a publicly-advertised event promoting “solidarity” with Cuba against the Trump administration. Speakers from the PSL and the leftist Hatuey Project echoed the Cuban government’s talking points about why it shot down two civilian aircraft carrying four American allies of a Cuban exile support group in 1996.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced long-anticipated charges Wednesday against former Cuban dictator Raúl Castro and five others over the incident as part of an increasingly aggressive posture toward the communist regime. Blocks from the White House, leftists in America’s capital went onstage Thursday to suggest no crime occurred at all.
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“They are charging him for an act of territorial defense that occurred 30 years ago,” a PSL speaker announced as Emily told the crowd of more than a dozen. “Let us be absolutely clear. This indictment is not an act of justice. It is a brazen provocation, a political instrument designed to manufacture consent for another war by the Trump administration.”
“Under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, every sovereign state possesses the inherent right to defend its territory, including its national airspace, against unlawful incursions,” she said.
Hosts also passed out pro-Cuba materials at the Liberation Center, one of dozens of similar event spaces the PSL is opening nationwide to organize for radical causes.
The two planes Cuban aircraft shot down were tied to Brothers to the Rescue, a group widely recognized in America as a non-violent humanitarian mission helping thousands flee tyranny and poverty under the late dictator Fidel Castro. The U.S. and United Nations have agreed that the downed planes were over international airspace rather than Cuban territory when they were destroyed, though American officials worried the rescue flights would heighten tensions, according to multiple reports.
Trump has shown several signs in his second term that Cuba is in for severe punishment for years of infractions against the U.S., even telling reporters he may have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
“Charging a 94-year-old former head of state for an act of territorial defense after Cuba exhausted every diplomatic channel, after the United States ignored its own legal obligations and its own internal warnings — this is not justice,” Emily said, closely echoing Cuban government messaging. “This is theater. This is the manufacture of a pretext.”
The Thursday audience also welcomed a speaker announced as Ben from Hatuey Project, which claims to provide humanitarian supplies to Cubans and is a self-described “project of” the leftist nonprofit People’s Forum. The People’s Forum has received millions of dollars from a China-supporting financier Neville Singham, while the PSL shares overlapping personnel with Singham-funded groups, according to investigations by the Daily Caller News Foundation and others.
A slide presentation from the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Hatuey Project calls on supporters to “stop Trump’s war on Cuba” at a May 21, 2026, event in Washington, D.C. (Hudson Crozier/Daily Caller News Foundation)
Ben called President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Cuba “illegal,” “genocidal” and a driver of Cuban poverty despite decades of socialist policies that stifled the country’s private sector. Trump also sanctioned Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” for refusing to extradite criminal defendants linked to American deaths, a label Ben called “bogus.”
“What would the United States do if Cuba flew a civilian airline flight or, whatever, over Miami?” Ben told the crowd. “What would happen? I mean, I think it sort of doesn’t even need to be answered.”
“But the point I guess I’m trying to say is that this state sponsor of terror designation is just such a projection, another realm of tightening the noose after they did have to shoot down this flight in the 90s,” the activist said.
While asserting Cuba’s right to violently defend its borders, the PSL’s Emily condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for seeking to deport Haitian border-crossers, describing herself as a “first-generation Haitian-American.”
“We will fight for a different world, a socialism that does not declare war on Cuba, on Haiti, on Iran, not on anyone, for domination and expansion,” she told her audience. “A world where no family lives in fear of a midnight raid, a world where the billions spent on aircraft carriers and ICE detention go instead to the communities that built the country and need it most.”
“That world is possible, but it will not be handed to us,” the socialist said. “We have to fight for it together in unity across every border that they try to draw between us.”
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