Former Cuban President Raul Castro is indicted in US

FILE PHOTO: Cuba’s former President Raul Castro claps during a ceremony marking the 69th anniversary of the July 26, 1953 rebel assault which late Cuban leader Fidel Castro led on the Moncada army barracks, in Cienfuegos, Cuba, July 26, 2022. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini/File Photo

Former Cuban President Raul Castro has been indicted in the US, a senior Trump administration official said yesterday, in a major escalation in Washington’s pressure campaign ‌against the island’s communist government. The indictment comes as US President Donald Trump has pushed for a regime change in ‌Cuba, where Castro’s communists have been in charge since his late brother Fidel Castro led a revolution in 1959.

“America will not ‌tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile foreign military, intelligence and terror ‌operations just ninety miles from the American homeland,” Trump said in ‌a statement earlier yesterday. The indictment marks a new low in relations between the longtime Cold War rivals.

After taking power, Fidel Castro struck an alliance with the Soviet Union, then seized US-citizen owned businesses and properties. The US has since maintained an economic embargo on the nation of about 10 mn.

The two sides have talked intermittently over the years. Diplomatic relations briefly improved during former Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term, but Trump, a Republican, has taken a harder line.

The charges against Raul Castro, 94, are expected to be based on a 1996 incident in which Cuban jets shot down planes operated by a group of Cuban exiles, a US Justice Department official told Reuters last week on the condition of anonymity. The Justice Department was unitl Tuesday planning to make an announcement.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the end of a four-year US ‌military occupation of Cuba on May 20, 1902, which itself followed centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Cuba’s government does not consider the date to mark the country’s independence day, arguing that it remained subservient to Washington until the 1959 revolution. In a post on X, Diaz-Canel said that in Cuban history, May 20 signified “intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration.”

Under Trump, the US has effectively imposed a blockade on Cuba by threatening sanctions on countries supplying it with fuel, triggering power outages and exacerbating its worst crisis in decades.

In a video message addressed to the Cuban people yesterday morning, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents were Cuban immigrants to the US, offered to forge a new relationship between the two countries. He said the US could provide $100 mn in aid, and blamed Cuba’s leaders for shortages of electricity, food and fuel.

In response, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called Rubio “the mouthpiece of corrupt and vengeful interests” but did not rule out accepting the aid.

“He keeps talking about an aid package of 100 mn dollars that Cuba has not rejected, but whose cynicism is evident to anyone in light of the devastating effect of the economic blockade and the energy stranglehold,”

Rodriguez wrote in a post ‌on X.

Cuba has yet to comment directly on the ‌criminal case against Raul Castro.

Born in 1931, Raul Castro was a key figure alongside his older brother in the guerrilla war that toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

He helped defeat the US-organised Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and served as defence minister for decades. He succeeded his brother as president in 2008 and stepped down in 2018, but remains a powerful behind-

the-scenes figure in Cuban politics.

He was defence minister at the time of the 1996 incident.

The two small planes that were shot down were being flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a group of Miami-based Cuban exile pilots. All four men aboard were killed.

The group said its mission was to search the Florida Straits for Cuban rafters fleeing the island, and routinely flew near the Cuban coast.

The Cuban government has argued the strike was a legitimate response to the planes intruding on Cuban airspace.

Fidel Castro said Cuba’s military had acted on “standing orders” to down planes entering Cuban airspace. He said Raul Castro did not give a specific order to shoot the planes.

The US condemned the attack and imposed sanctions, but did not pursue criminal charges against either Castro brother. The Justice Department charged three Cuban military officers in 2003 but they were never extradited.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation later concluded the shootdown took place over international waters.

The filing of the criminal case against a US adversary like Castro recalls the earlier drug-trafficking indictment of imprisoned former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an ally of Havana’s.

The Trump administration cited that indictment as a justification for the January 3 raid on Caracas by the US military in which Maduro was captured and brought to New York to face the charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

Trump says Cuba’s communist government is corrupt, and in March threatened that Cuba “is next” after Venezuela. Diaz-Canel said ‌on Monday that any US military action against Cuba would lead to a “bloodbath.”