More than three decades after Cuban fighter jets shot down two civilian aircraft belonging to the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, the Justice Department has finally brought criminal charges against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro in a case that federal prosecutors in Miami first attempted to pursue back in the 1990s.
The charges, announced Wednesday during a ceremony in Miami honoring the victims of the 1996 attack, accuse the 94-year-old former Cuban president of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of an aircraft, and four counts of murder.
Castro is not in U.S. custody.
The indictment centers on the February 24, 1996, shootdown of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes by Cuban MiG fighters over international waters. Four men were killed in the attack, including three American citizens.
At the time, Raúl Castro was serving as Cuba’s defense minister under his brother Fidel Castro and allegedly played a direct role in authorizing or overseeing the operation.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges on a symbolic date for many Cuban exiles: Cuba’s Independence Day.
For prosecutors and Cuban-American activists, the announcement marked the culmination of a decades-long effort that repeatedly stalled under multiple administrations.
Guy Lewis, a former U.S. attorney in Miami who helped prosecute Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, said momentum for charging Castro first accelerated after Noriega’s successful conviction in the early 1990s.
“On the heels of the Noriega case, we frankly redoubled the efforts to move this case forward,” Lewis said.
According to Lewis, investigators gathered evidence suggesting senior Cuban officials, including Raúl Castro, had ties to Colombian drug cartels and provided protection for trafficking operations. Prosecutors drafted an early indictment during that period, but the effort eventually faded after details leaked publicly.
The Brothers to the Rescue attack reignited the push.
The organization originally formed to locate and rescue Cuban refugees stranded at sea but later became openly anti-regime, flying missions near Cuban airspace and dropping thousands of political leaflets over Havana.
Federal investigators later uncovered an extensive Cuban spy network operating inside South Florida known as La Red Avispa — the Wasp Network. Cuban intelligence agents had infiltrated anti-Castro exile groups, including Brothers to the Rescue itself, and reportedly provided the Cuban military with advance warning about the group’s flights.
In 2000, five members of the spy ring were convicted on espionage-related charges. Prosecutors argued at trial that the shootdown had been planned in advance and coordinated using intelligence gathered by the network.
“This was not a one-off,” former prosecutor David Buckner said. “It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. This was a planned-out homicide.”
According to prosecutors, Cuban intelligence operatives even ensured that Gerardo Hernandez — the leader of the spy ring — was not aboard one of the planes before the attack took place.
The case remained politically explosive for years, particularly after the Obama administration’s 2014 prisoner exchange with Cuba that returned Hernandez and other convicted Cuban spies to Havana.
That decision sparked outrage throughout South Florida’s Cuban-American community.
“My reaction was anger,” Lewis recalled. “It was like spitting in the face of these families and the memory of these men.”
Behind the scenes, however, former prosecutors and Cuban exile advocates never abandoned the effort to charge Castro directly.
Attorney George Fowler, whose family fled Cuba when he was a child, said he spent years lobbying for action and personally pushed the issue with President Donald Trump.
“I’ve been trying to get the Castros indicted since I was 9-years-old,” Fowler said.
Part of that renewed effort involved a detailed legal memo Lewis prepared in 2016 outlining a possible prosecution against Castro. The document eventually reached senior Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
No indictment emerged at the time.
Until now.
The charges against Castro come as the Justice Department under Trump has increasingly revisited long-dormant political and national security cases tied to foreign adversaries and unresolved Cold War-era conflicts.
Whether Castro will ever face trial remains uncertain. Cuba is extraordinarily unlikely to extradite him, and at 94 years old, his health and mobility are already major factors.
But for families connected to the Brothers to the Rescue victims and for many Cuban exiles, the indictment itself carries symbolic weight after nearly 30 years of waiting.
For them, Wednesday’s announcement represented something they long believed might never happen: the U.S. government formally accusing one of the Castro brothers of murder in an American courtroom.
