Reports: Trump administration prepares to seek Raúl Castro indictment 

MIAMI (AP):

The Justice Department is preparing to seek an indictment against former Cuban president Raúl Castro, three people familiar with the matter told AP yesterday, as President Donald Trump threatens possible military action against the communist-run island.

One source said the potential indictment is linked to Castro’s alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of four planes operated by the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Castro was defence minister at the time.

All three people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss an ongoing investigation. The Cuban government did not respond to a request for comment on the potential indictment, which was first reported by CBS.

Any criminal charge against Castro, which would require approval by a grand jury, would sharply escalate tensions with Havana and heighten expectations of US military action in Cuba, similar to the operation carried out in January in Venezuela to bring President Nicolás Maduro to New York on drug-trafficking charges.

Following Maduro’s ouster, the Trump administration quickly turned its attention to his ally Cuba and ordered an economic blockade that choked off fuel shipments, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and a collapse in economic activity across the island.

The US war in Iran appeared to have given Cuban leaders some respite from Washington’s talk of regime change.

As Trump seeks to wind down that conflict, speculation has grown that he may soon refocus on Cuba, after pledging earlier this year a “friendly takeover” of the country if its leadership failed to open up its economy to American investment and expel US adversaries.

Richard Feinberg, a professor emeritus specialising in Latin America at the University of California, San Diego, said that any indictment of Castro would play well with voters in south Florida but is unlikely to persuade Pentagon planners to pursue a second war of choice — this time just 90 miles from Florida.

“There’s no easy Venezuela copy,” Feinberg said. “There’s no clear line of succession and it’s hard to imagine regime change without US boots on the ground.”

The US attorney in Miami has created a special working group of prosecutors and federal law-enforcement officials to build cases against senior Cuban figures, amid calls from several south Florida Republicans to reopen the investigation into Castro’s alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down.

Trump declined to comment directly on a potential indictment, deferring to the Justice Department.

“But they need help, as you know, and you talk about a declining country — they are really a nation or a country in decline, so we’re going to see,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We have a lot to talk about on Cuba, but not maybe for today.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe met Cuban officials, including Castro’s grandson, during a high-level visit to the island on Thursday.

Castro, now 94, succeeded his ailing brother Fidel as president in 2011 before handing power to a loyalist, Miguel Díaz-Canel, in 2019.

Although he has largely avoided the spotlight since stepping down as head of the Cuban Communist Party in 2021, he is widely believed to wield influence behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who has previously held a private meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Cuba’s shoot-down in 1996 of two Cessna aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue marked a watershed in decades of hostilities between the two countries.

At the time, President Bill Clinton was cautiously exploring ways to ease tensions with a Cold War adversary but faced strong opposition from exiles who staged flyovers of Havana, dropped anti-Castro leaflets and assisted Cuban rafters fleeing economic hardship and single-party rule.

Cuban authorities had warned the US government for months that they were prepared to respond to what they viewed as deliberate provocations. However, those warnings went unheeded, and on February 26, 1996, missiles fired by Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets downed two unarmed civilian aircraft just beyond Cuba’s airspace, according to an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization. A third plane narrowly escaped.

“With hindsight, it appears the Castros’ motive was to slow down the Clinton outreach because they needed the US as an external enemy to justify their national security posture,” said Feinberg, who worked on Cuban issues at the National Security Council at the time.

“They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams,” he added.

Shortly after the shoot-down, Congress passed what became known as the Helms-Burton Act, which codified the US trade embargo imposed in 1962 and made it far more difficult for successive administrations to engage with Cuba.

To date, the US has convicted only one person of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the Brothers to the Rescue incident. Gerardo Hernández, leader of a Cuban espionage network dismantled by the FBI in the 1990s, was sentenced to life imprisonment but released by President Barack Obama in a 2014 prisoner swap as part of efforts to normalise relations with Cuba.

Two fighter-jet pilots and their commanding officer have also been indicted but remain beyond the reach of US law enforcement in Cuba.

Castro has previously been the subject of a US criminal investigation. In 1993, federal prosecutors in Miami considered charging him and several senior Cuban military officials with cocaine trafficking, based on testimony from Colombian traffickers in the trial of former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the AP reported in 2006.

However, no indictment followed, amid concerns over the credibility of witnesses and fears that such action could jeopardise US intelligence operations and derail Clinton’s tentative outreach to Havana.