United States is moving to indict 94-year-old former Cuban president Raúl Castro over the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft that killed four people — a prosecution three decades in the making that arrives as the Trump administration pursues its most aggressive pressure campaign against Havana since the Cold War’s most heated years.
The potential indictment, which requires grand jury approval before it can proceed, would center on Cuba’s destruction of two Cessna planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a humanitarian exile group that searched for Cubans attempting to flee the island on rafts. Cuban MiG-29 fighter jets shot the aircraft down in February 1996, killing all four people aboard. The Organization of American States subsequently found the planes were downed outside Cuban airspace and concluded that Cuba had violated international law by firing without warning and without evidence that an attack was necessary. Fidel Castro told CBS News at the time that his military was acting on his “general orders” to stop planes from entering Cuban airspace. Raúl led Cuba’s armed forces when the order was carried out.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the planned indictment. US officials familiar with the matter confirmed the effort to CBS News.
Raúl Castro formally stepped aside as leader of Cuba’s Communist Party in 2021 but remains one of the most consequential figures in the Cuban power structure at 94. His grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro — known widely as Raulito — is viewed both as a representative of the former president and as the primary contact point between the Castro family and American officials navigating the current diplomatic pressure.
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CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Raulito on Thursday, his second such meeting in as many months. Ratcliffe delivered a message from Trump directly: the United States is “prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.” A CIA official added that Cuba “can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere” — language that frames the pressure campaign not as punitive but as conditional, leaving a door open while making the price of entry explicit.
The indictment effort sits within a broader escalation that has been building since January, when the US military removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power and flew him to New York to face drug charges.
Venezuela had been Cuba’s most critical economic and political partner. Its removal from that role left Havana more isolated and more economically vulnerable than at any point in recent memory, and the Trump administration has been applying pressure into that vulnerability with intent.
The administration has threatened heavy tariffs on any country that exports oil to Cuba — a threat effective enough that shipments have been largely cut off, producing energy shortages across the island.
Trump has simultaneously pressed for major political reforms and floated what he has called a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, a formulation that deliberately echoes his language about Greenland and Panama and signals an appetite for dramatic restructuring of the country’s political arrangement rather than incremental diplomatic adjustment.
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Miami’s top federal prosecutor launched a dedicated initiative several months ago targeting Cuban Communist Party leadership specifically, coordinating federal and local law enforcement with the Treasury Department to pursue economic crimes, drug charges, violent crimes and immigration violations against those at the top of the Cuban system. The Castro indictment effort is the most prominent product of that initiative so far.
One person has previously been convicted in US courts in connection with the 1996 shootdown. Gerardo Hernandez was found guilty of murder conspiracy after prosecutors alleged he was part of a Cuban spy ring that passed information about Brothers to the Rescue to Cuban intelligence services. He was sentenced to life in prison but released to Cuba in a 2014 prisoner swap under the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening with Havana.
Florida’s attorney general announced in March that a shuttered state investigation into the same 1996 incident had been reopened. Republican Senator Rick Scott and other Florida lawmakers have been pressing the Justice Department to charge Castro and pursue extradition. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis responded to Thursday’s CBS News report on social media with three words: “Let ‘er rip, it’s been a long time coming.”
Whether a 94-year-old man living in Havana will ever face an American courtroom is a question the indictment process cannot answer on its own. What the effort does accomplish, regardless of whether Castro is ever physically brought to trial, is establish a legal and political framework that defines him as a criminal defendant under American law — a designation that carries its own diplomatic weight and signals to the Cuban government that the current administration’s pressure has no ceiling that Havana has yet identified.