The US Justice Department on Wednesday unsealed an indictment for 94-year-old Raul Castro, Cuba’s former president and brother of long-time leader Fidel Castro, a move clearly aimed at providing a pretext for the US to attack the island nation.
The indictment is related to the 1996 shoot-down of two planes belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group formed in the US, an incident that occurred when Castro served as Cuba’s defense minister. The BTTR was founded by Jose Basulto, who has previously said he was trained by the CIA and admitted to taking part in a 1962 operation that involved him firing a 20mm cannon on a Cuban hotel.
In the lead-up to the shoot-down, which killed four Cuban Americans, Clinton administration officials expressed concern that there would be an incident if the BTTR continued flights that intruded into Cuba’s airspace, which were happening frequently, according to documents published by the US National Security Archive on Tuesday.
“Starting a year before the shootdown, the Cuban government filed multiple protests on repeated violations of its airspace by BTTR aircraft overflying populated zones and dropping thousands of leaflets and other materials calling for popular insurrection against the government,” the National Security Archive said in a release on the documents.
One of the documents that was published was an email written by a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official at the time that cited “further taunting of the Cuban Government” by the Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR) overflights and State Department concern about a “worst case scenario” in which “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes and the FAA better have all its ducks in a row.”
The National Security Archive said that before the planes that were shot down took off from Miami, a White House official contacted the FAA in Florida and instructed them to block the flights, but they refused and only delivered a warning against flying into Cuba’s airspace.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement on the indictment that for “the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens.”
The incident follows the same playbook that the US pursued in its attack on Venezuela to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and it comes as the US is enforcing a ramped-up oil embargo on Cuba and has increased military surveillance near the country. President Trump has also openly threatened war against the country, saying he may “have the honor” of “taking” Cuba.
