Why does the US want to prosecute former Cuban President Raúl Castro?

Pedro Marin

The Donald Trump administration has just indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro for the downing of two planes in 1996.

Given the similarities between the measures taken against Cuba in recent months and the modus operandi of the United States in its attack on Venezuela, the indictment of the Cuban leader could represent another step towards military action against the island.

According to Bloomberg, in addition to Castro, Washington is also reportedly eyeing the current Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and family members of Cuban government officials.

Just as Venezuela experienced in the months leading up to the military operation on 3 January of this year – which ended with the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and Congress member and First Lady Cilia Flores –Cuba has been facing a naval and energy blockade.

With this blockade, the Trump administration has, over the past three months, cut off the flow of oil to Havana, which is essential for the island’s energy supply. In effect, the blockade has left Cuba essentially paralysed, disrupting services such as transport, garbage collection, healthcare and education.

And just as the drug trafficking charges against Maduro allowed the US government to launch its military operation in Caracas without prior congressional authorisation, the indictment of Cuban officials would also permit limited military action against the island without legislative authorisation.

What would differentiate the two actions is that, in the case of Cuba, Washington’s aim would be to create, as much as possible, a vacuum in the island’s governmental structure, overthrowing both the Cuban state leadership and potential successors. It would thus avoid the Venezuelan scenario, in which the ousting of Maduro did not result in the government’s removal or the dismantling of the political forces that sustain it.

Cuba is not as strategically relevant as Venezuela, of course. But a military action against the island could be especially important for Trump on the eve of the midterm elections, which will take place in November: first, because it would offer an important symbolic achievement following his entanglement in the Iranian quagmire.

Since the Missile Crisis in 1962, when President John F Kennedy reached an agreement with Khrushchev that the US would not invade Cuba, Washington’s overt military attempts against Havana have effectively ceased.

No US president has again attempted to overthrow the Cuban government by force – the last such attempt was the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

The US has never accepted the symbolic humiliation of coexisting with a rebel government just a few hundred kilometres from Florida, but all its presidents have set aside the prospect of a military solution.

Breaking with this tradition would send a strong message to the world and the American public: Trump is not deterred by either diplomatic legacy or the strategic irrelevance of certain actions. Anyone is a potential target.

Most importantly, however, is the fact that a successful action against the island would mobilise the support, votes and money of the Cuban community in the US, estimated at 2.9 million people, of whom between 1.2 and 1.5 million are voters.

With most election polls pointing to a Democratic victory in the midterm elections, which would end the Republican majority in Congress, this is a contingent that cannot be ignored by the current occupant of the White House.

Humanitarian organisation or terrorist group?

After months of insisting that Maduro was the leader of a fictitious drug trafficking organisation, the US effectively backed away from the role attributed to the Venezuelan president to justify his abduction.

However, the accusation that Maduro was the leader of a narco-terrorist organisation called the ‘Cartel de Los Soles’ was used precisely to criminally indict Maduro, along with 14 other members of the Venezuelan government, six years earlier, in March 2020.

In the case of the indictment against Raúl Castro, the charge would be that Castro, then Cuba’s defence minister, bore direct responsibility for the shooting of two planes belonging to the Cuban-American organisation Hermanos al Rescate on 24 February 1996, which resulted in four deaths.

The event did indeed occur – the planes were shot down, four people died –and it is certain that Raúl, as defence minister, bore some level of responsibility for the firing of the air-to-air missiles by a MiG-29 that brought down the planes.

But, contrary to what has been widely reported in the press, this was not an unjustified attack against “unarmed volunteers from a humanitarian organisation”.

Founded in Miami in May 1991, formally to assist balseros (Cubans making the crossing in boats, often makeshift, towards the US), Hermanos al Rescate was involved in numerous violations of Cuban airspace prior to the shootdown on 24 February 1996.

Its founder and leader, José Basulto, had been, as he himself acknowledged, a CIA agent trained in the US, Panama and Guatemala, who participated, on behalf of the agency, in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and in an attempt to sabotage a missile base on the island.

He also participated, on behalf of the anti-Castro organisation Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil – also supported and financed by the CIA – in the attack on the Hornedo de Rosita hotel in Havana in August 1962, during which he fired dozens of rounds from a 20mm automatic cannon at the hotel from a speedboat. 

Commenting on the incident years later, Basulto said: “We were some pretty [lousy] terrorists, I’ll tell you. Anyone else would have used explosive ammunition. But our intention wasn’t to kill people, but rather to scare the hell out of them.”

When Basulto decided to found his organisation in 1991, Cuba was in the Special Period, a time when the island was undergoing a severe economic crisis following the collapse of its then-largest trading partner, the Soviet Union.

As Fernando Morais describes in his The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, for its early operations, Basulto’s organisation received three O-2 aircraft, “retired after years of service with the US Air Force in the Vietnam War (1959–75) and the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–92). Basulto had been gifted the aircraft by order of President George Bush, at the request of Cuban-American Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.”

The Special Period gave Hermanos many opportunities to drop survival kits and medical supplies to rafters in the Florida Straits, an activity that guaranteed the organisation annual donations in the amount of $1.1m (as in 1993 and 1994).

But with changes in US migratory policy towards Cubans beginning in 1995, the number of rafters began to dwindle, and donations to Hermanos dried up.

It was from that point on that the organisation intensified its illegal overflights of Cuba, violating the island’s airspace to drop leaflets inciting Cubans to rebellion. It was on one of these occasions, after dozens of violations of its airspace, that the Cuban Air Force shot down the two Cessna planes belonging to Hermanos.

A few months before the incident, in October 1995, a new anti-Castro group emerged in Miami: the Cuban Council.

The group’s aim was not to carry out terrorist attacks against the island or to assassinate Cuban leaders, as did a myriad of organisations such as Alpha 66, the Command of United Revolutionary Organizations (Coru), Omega 7, the National Democratic Union Party (PUND), the Comandos L, the Comandos F4, the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) or Luis Posada Carrilles’ network – all of which were responsible for bombings, kidnappings, shootings and assassination attempts.

Nor was it a matter of invading Cuban air and maritime space from Florida to carry out acts of propaganda, as Basulto’s Hermanos al Rescate and Ramón Saúl Sánchez’s Democracy Movement did.

The council had a more liberal face; it capitalised on terms like democracy and human rights, and its strategy was to build a network of organisations and Cuban ‘civil society’ to confront the government.

It had emerged by formally requesting of Fidel Castro, through the Cuban delegation to the UN, that its first assembly be held in Havana on 24, 25, 26, and 27 February 1996, and it enjoyed the public support of the White House.

As Fernando Morais recounts, “In one of his lectures addressed to anti-Castro leaders in Florida, Under Secretary of State Richard Nuccio made clear President Clinton’s position on the ‘Cuban issue’.

“You place too much emphasis on Fidel, and the solution is not in his hands, but in the hands of the human rights communities within the island,’ the official said.

“If the Cuban exile community provides massive support to organisations like the Council, it could bring enormous benefits to Cuba and give the Cuban community abroad a positive role in resolving the crisis.’’

In fact, heeding the undersecretary of state’s call, organisations such as Hermanos and the Democracy Movement – despite tactical differences with the council – began collaborating with the fledgling movement.

The announcement that the organisations would carry out propaganda actions within Cuban airspace and in the vicinity of Cuban territorial waters in support of the council prompted a notice to pilots and air traffic controllers issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US federal agency responsible for aviation laws, at the request of the State Department.

It stated, at one point: “The government of Cuba has reaffirmed on several occasions its decision to take measures against aircraft that violate its airspace. These measures are intended to defend Cuban national sovereignty and prevent overflights by unauthorised aircraft. Anyone entering Cuban airspace without authorisation will be subject to arrest and may expose themselves and others to serious personal risk.”

Despite these concerns, the organisations carried out the promised actions in late October 1995 without any response from the Cuban government. Thus, they repeated the actions on 9 December, 13 January and 14 January, raising further concerns from the State Department and the FAA.

Morais describes another FAA memo: “In commenting on yet another incursion by Basulto, [the FAA director] stated that ‘these overflights can only be seen as a mockery of the Cuban government’. According to her, the State Department was increasingly concerned about Cuba’s reactions to ‘these flagrant violations’, to the point that Undersecretary Richard Nuccio had ordered an inquiry into the status of a case filed by the FAA against Basulto for violating aviation regulations. ‘The worst-case scenario would be Cuba shooting down one of these aircraft.’’

This is exactly what happened on 24 February, the date of the council’s meeting. When he contacted the Havana control tower to inform them that the operational area for the three Hermanos al Rescate planes would be north of the city, José Basulto was told that the area was ‘activated’ (that is, under the protection of military aircraft) and that any incursion would be subject to risks.

“As free Cubans, we have the right to be here,” was the dissident’s reply about 20 minutes before the two planes from the organisation accompanying him were struck by missiles from a Cuban MiG-29.

Although there is dispute over whether the downed planes were in Cuban airspace at the time of the shootdown, there is no doubt that at least one of them – Basulto’s – crossed the invisible border that day, not to mention the countless previous occasions on which the organisation violated Cuban airspace.

It is also well known that this was not an unannounced tragedy, both because the Cuban government had protested numerous times to the US government about the activities of Hermanos and other organisations operating in Florida, and because the US government itself, through the State Department and the FAA, had issued warnings about the risks involved in the organisation’s flights.

The shooting down of the planes put an end to the possibility of a rapprochement between the Cuban government and the Bill Clinton administration.

In addition to the suspension of charter flights to Cuba, restrictions on Cuban officials entering the US, the expansion of Radio Martí’s reach – funded by the US government to broadcast propaganda against Cuba – and the authorisation to use Cuban assets frozen in the US to compensate the families of the deceased pilots, the downing of the planes also led to the signing of the Helms-Burton Act. This expanded the sanctions imposed on the island to essentially any foreign company doing business with Cuba, any ship docking at Cuban ports, and any investors making investments on the island.

The shooting down of the Hermanos planes on 24 February 1996 was not a crime. It was, as the FAA had predicted, “a measure intended to defend Cuban national sovereignty”.

Had they been planes from Cuban organisations entering US airspace to drop leaflets over Miami, it is certain they would have been shot down on the very first attempt.

Nor was it a military act against harmless, unarmed civilian aircraft: the same planes that were dropping leaflets over Havana could, after all, at any moment, drop explosives, if they so desired.

Just as Basulto seemed to think that firing indiscriminately at a hotel with dozens of rounds of ammunition designed to penetrate the armour of warships was not “terrorism”, because “someone else would have used explosive ammunition”, he is likely to have considered the constant violation of Cuban airspace by his planes to drop leaflets demanding the government’s downfall to be “humanitarian missions”.

Every time the press calls Hermanos al Rescate a “humanitarian organisation”, it ends up subscribing to this curious line of reasoning.

But, more seriously than that, it helps ensure that the measures adopted by Trump against Cuba and its leaders, including a possible military action on the island, are presented to the public as just. – Globetrotter / Revista Opera

Pedro Marin is the founder and chief editor of Revista Opera, an independent news outlet in Brazil. He is also opinion editor at Opera Mundi. His latest book is “Aproximações sucessivas: o Partido Fardado nos governos Bolsonaro e Lula III (Escritos: 2019-2023)” (Successive approaches: the Military Party in the Bolsonaro and Lula III administrations (Writings: 2019-2023)), on the Armed Forces’ tutelage of Brazilian politics. He has also co-authored Carta no Coturno: a volta do Partido Fardado no Brasil” (Ace up the Boots: the return of the Military Party in Brazil).

Support Aliran's work with an online donation. Scan this QR code using your mobile phone e-wallet or banking app: