US indicts Cuba ex-leader Raul Castro
The United States on Wednesday indicted Cuba’s former leader Raul Castro on murder charges, fueling speculation that President Donald Trump will try to topple the communist state.
The charges against the former president—who at 94 years old remains influential in Cuban politics—stem from the deadly 1996 downing of two civilian planes manned by anti-Castro pilots.
Castro is the younger brother of Fidel Castro, the late iconic US nemesis who led Cuba’s 1959 communist revolution.
In addition to murder, Castro has been charged with conspiracy to kill Americans and destruction of aircraft.
‘Falling apart’
The US government previously seized on a domestic indictment to justify military action in January that toppled and seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a staunch ally of Cuba.
Trump hailed the indictment on Wednesday as a “very big moment” but played down prospects of moving on Cuba, whose economy has been in deepening crisis for months amid a US oil blockade.
“There won’t be escalation. I don’t think there needs to be. Look, the place is falling apart. It’s a mess, and they sort of lost control,” he told reporters.
The Cuban government in a statement said that the 1996 shootdown was “legitimate self-defense” against an airspace violation.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel wrote on X that the charges carry no legal basis and “add to the file they are fabricating to justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba.”
Five other Cubans were also charged, including the air force pilots who shot down the planes.
Four people died in the 1996 incident, sending relations plummeting. Two decades later, Raul Castro joined US President Barack Obama in an effort to reconcile.
Trump reversed Obama’s effort to improve relations and has been steadily tightening sanctions on the island, already under a US embargo almost continuously since the communist revolution.
Major blackouts
Trump has repeatedly signaled that the Cuban government could be next after Venezuela to fall to US pressure, and earlier this month even said Washington would be “taking over” the Caribbean island, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) from Florida, “almost immediately.”
In a video message to the Cuban people in Spanish, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself a Cuban American, accused the Havana leadership of theft, corruption, and oppression.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” Rubio said in the message on the day Cuban Americans mark the island’s independence from Spain.
The US ousting of Maduro has hit Cuba hard, cutting off a supply of free Venezuelan oil to the island which has suffered major blackouts.
The renewed focus on Cuba comes as Trump struggles to end an unpopular war he launched on Iran, which has rebuffed his demands for concessions.
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