MIAMI — In a watershed moment for the Cuban American community, the U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday in Miami that a federal grand jury has indicted Cuba’s longtime ruler Raúl Castro, charging him with the murders of four people in the 1996 shoot-down of two civilian planes belonging to the Cuban exile organization Brothers to the Rescue.

The indictment of Castro, who will be 95 next month but remains the island’s ultimate authority, was brought by a federal grand jury led by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

The formal accusation was announced by acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a symbolic event at Miami Dade College’s Freedom Tower to honor the victims of the shoot-down.

“We are announcing an indictment charging Raúl Castro and several others with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals,” Blanche said, prompting rounds of standing applause in an audience packed with prominent Cuban American leaders, activists, lawyers and relatives of the victims. “My message today is clear. The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens. He also does not forget the families, the loved ones, and the friends who have carried grief and heartache for 30 years.”

The announcement coincides with another anniversary Wednesday of Cuba’s Independence Day. The formal accusation comes at a time the Trump administration has escalated the pressure on the communist government in Havana to make significant reforms. It has generated much expectation in Miami, where activists believe that the indictment could pave the way for the sort of U.S. military action that ended with the Jan. 3 capture of Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro, indicted for narcoterrorism during the first Trump administration.

The indictment charges Castro and five other defendants with conspiracy to kill those U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder for the killing of the four people aboard the two planes that were shot down: Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, Carlos Costa and Pablo Morales.

The indictment also charges Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez, one of the pilots who shot the planes down, and four other pilots who took part in the Cuban air force operation that day: Emilio Jose Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raul Simanca Cardenas and Luis Raúl Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez.

González-Pardo is the only one currently in U.S. custody. He entered the United States in 2017 but was later arrested and charged with immigration fraud.

Government prosecutors revisited the criminal investigation in a 2003 case against Gen. Rubén Martínez Puente, the head of the Cuban air force at the time of the shoot-down, and the two pilots who shot down the planes, the brothers Lorenzo Alberto and Francisco Pérez-Pérez. At they time, they had been indicted by a federal grand jury for murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, but Castro was not charged. They were never tried and Martínez Puente died in 2021.

“Nations and their leaders cannot be permitted to target Americans, kill them, and not face accountability,” Blanche said. “President Trump is committed to restoring a very simple but important principle. If you kill Americans, we will pursue you, no matter who you are, no matter what title you hold, and in this case, no matter how much time has passed.”

After the announcement, Cuba’s formal president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said Cuba had acted “in legitimate defense.”

“The ethical stature and humanist spirit of his work dismantle any slander that might be leveled against Army General Raúl Castro,” he said in a publication on X.

The indictment revisits events that happened 30 years ago, on Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuban MiG fighter jets shot down two Cessna aircraft operated by the Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile organization that searched for Cuban rafters at sea. A third plane carrying the head of the organization, José Basulto, was able to escape. The shooting happened over international waters, according to an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The Miami planes were unarmed, but the Cuban government justified the shootings, arguing the organization had dropped leaflets over Havana in previous incidents.

Ahead of the indictment announcement, the Cuban Embassy in Washington had been sharing media reports and declassified documents showing Cuba had complained about the flights, and that White House officials in the Clinton administration, worried about a potential incident, had unsuccessfully tried to ground the Brothers to the Rescue planes.

The downing of the planes ended up triggering even harsher U.S. sanctions against Cuba and the codification of the decades-old embargo when Congress approved the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. There is suspicion among Cuban experts that Fidel Castro might have given the order to shoot down the planes in order to shut down efforts by the Clinton administration to improve relations. Before the shoot-down, Cuban spies had infiltrated the Brothers to the Rescue group.

Relatives of the men killed by the Cuban MiGs, who were invited to the Freedom Tower event, said this was a day they have long hoped to see.

“My father was a Vietnam veteran, and it’s very important for me that the country that he called his home gives him the respect and the justice he deserves, as well as the other three men,” said Marlene Alejandre-Triana, the daughter of Armando Alejandre, who was 45 at the time of is death.

His sister, Maggie Alejandre Khuly, said the indictment was a step in the right direction.

“We´ll see what happens next,” she said. “It’s a bit more of the justice that we are seeking. We have been working for this since day one, because we not only wanted to go after the pilots who actually shut down the planes but also those behind it. And this is certainly the head of the Cuban armed forces.”

“We are very pleased and we are not going to stop,” she said.

A coordinated operation

Prosecutors say the shoot-down was not an improvised military reaction but the culmination of a coordinated intelligence and military operation known as “Operation Scorpion” that had been launched weeks earlier by Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate.

According to the indictment, Cuban spies operating in South Florida were instructed to closely monitor Brothers to the Rescue activities and provide detailed information on planned flights to Havana. The operation allegedly relied heavily on members of the so-called “Wasp Network,” a Cuban spy ring that had infiltrated exile organizations in Miami during the 1990s.

The indictment also says that Cuban intelligence agents were warned not to board Brothers to the Rescue aircraft during the Feb. 24 flights, suggesting prior knowledge that the planes would be targeted.

One of those agents, Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban military officer who had infiltrated exile groups in Miami while secretly working for Havana, abruptly left the United States days before the shoot-down and returned to Cuba. Prosecutors say Cuban intelligence officers also instructed their operatives to use coded phrases over aircraft radios while relaying real-time flight information to Havana.

The head of the Cuban air force, two of the pilots involved in the shoot-down, and the head of a Cuban spy ring in Miami were all indicted in different U.S. cases in the years that followed, but neither Fidel nor Raul Castro was ever charged.

Federal prosecutors contend that Raúl Castro, who served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time and oversaw the armed forces for decades, occupied a central role in the chain of command that approved the operation.

The indictment states that all orders flowed through the Cuban military hierarchy with Raul Castro and Fidel Castro “as the final decision makers,” reinforcing longstanding accusations from exile groups and former U.S. officials that the decision to use lethal force came from the top levels of the Cuban government.

The indictment also provides new details on the extent of the Cuban military preparations leading up to the attack. Prosecutors say Cuban MiG fighter pilots conducted training exercises in January 1996 specifically designed to intercept and track slow-moving civilian aircraft similar to the Cessna planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue.

The exercises allegedly involved pilots Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez, Emilio José Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raúl Simanca Cárdenas and Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, all of whom are named as co-defendants in the case.

Public statements implicating Raul Castro, who was the actual head of the armed forces, in the decision to shoot down the planes had emerged over the years, some of which were mentioned in the indictment.

In an audio first obtained by el Nuevo Herald of a June 1996 meeting with Cuban journalists, Raúl Castro is heard saying: “I said they should try to shoot them down over our territory, but they would enter Havana and then leave ... Of course, with one of those air-to-air missiles, what comes crashing down is a ball of fire, and it’s going to fall right on top of the city. Well, shoot them down over the sea when they appear.”

Fidel Castro also told Time magazine in 1996 that his brother Raúl, the Cuban defense minister at the time of the downing of the planes, was part of the chain of command that decided to target the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.

A transcript of the conversations between the two MiG jet fighters released in 1996 by then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, shows the pilots were gleeful after downing the planes. “This one won’t mess around anymore,” said one of the pilots after shooting one of the civilian planes, which carried three American citizens and a U.S. resident.

The indictment also underscores that the aircraft were allegedly shot down over international waters while flying away from Cuba, a key point that has long been disputed by Havana.

According to prosecutors, the Cuban military did not issue warnings before firing air-to-air missiles at the planes. One of the three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft managed to escape destruction after Cuban MiGs pursued it near the 24th latitude, the maritime boundary commonly used as an operational marker in the Florida Straits.

The filing portrays the attack as part of a broader campaign by the Cuban government to intimidate the exile community and suppress pro-democracy activism. Prosecutors argue the operation was intended not only to destroy the Brothers to the Rescue planes but also to “terrorize, intimidate and retaliate” against Cuban exiles and dissidents opposed to the communist government.

“It’s hard to imagine it has been 30 years since those four men were murdered in cold blood in such a monstrous way,” said Bob Martinez, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District, who as a civilian attorney won a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of the men’s relatives against the government of Cuba. “The glee from the pilots and the military tower after each destruction that pulverized the men and their aircraft just puts an exclamation point on their depravity.”

Referring to Fidel Castro’s well-known phrase, “history will absolve me,” Martinez said “history will condemn Fidel, Raúl and their family dictatorship into the dustbin of history.”

A major vindication

After so many years, many Cuban exiles see the formal accusation of Raul Castro — who has been accused of murdering people during the 1950s guerrilla fights in the Sierra Maestra mountains that brought his brother into power, presided over the country’s armed forces and continued the family rule over the island after his brother Fidel got sick and died in 2016 — as a major vindication.

“The families have waited, the Miami community has waited, and our country has waited,” Quiñones said. “Today it’s a step towards accountability. This is the first time in almost 70 years that a senior leadership of a Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for acts of violence resulting in the death of Americans. The passage of time does not erase murder, it does not diminish the value of those lives, and it does not weaken our commitment to the rule of law.”

Marcell Felipe, a lawyer and chairman of the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, said the formal accusation against Castro “represents justice for the families, vindication for the Cuban exiles, and a pragmatic message for the generals on the island: Raúl will not be part of the solution, and therefore they must think about their own future.”

As guests started filling the Freedom Tower on Wednesday, Cuban exiles were celebrating the day.

“This is a happy day because without justice there cannot be peace for the families, for our community and for all the pain and suffering we have endured for 30 years,” said Sylvia Iriondo, a Cuban exile activist who was aboard the third plane that got away during the shooting.

Several Cuban exile organizations had asked President Donald Trump during his first term to indict Castro as an act of justice that could speed up regime change on the island. In February, the three Cuban American members of Congress from Miami — Mario Díaz-Balart, Carlos Giménez, and María Elvira Salazar — and New York Republican Nicole Malliotakis wrote to Trump to ask the Department of Justice to reopen the investigation into Castro’s role in the shoot-down.

“We believe unequivocally that Raul Castro is responsible for this heinous crime; it is time for him to be brought to justice,” they wrote.

In March, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the state was reopening a criminal investigation into Raul Castro’s role in the incident.

Experts note that the indictment is part of a pressure campaign to get concessions that the Cuban government has so far resisted, as well as a symbolic gesture of the administration on behalf of Cuban Americans, a solid Republican bloc that helped elect Trump. Local politicians canceled scheduled events for the chance to be seen at the gathering at the Freedom Tower.

But some doubt that the nonagenarian Castro, who turns 95 in June, will ever be brought to justice in the United States.

“It’s hard to see how this ends up as anything other than a huge symbolic show to satisfy the anxieties of the Cuban-American constituency ahead of the midterms,” Orlando J. Pérez, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, wrote on X. “The prospects that Raul Castro will end up in a U.S. court are infinitesimal.”

The indictment will allow Trump to say he did what others couldn’t do, said John Kavulich, a longtime Cuba observer and president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. “It’s optics, it’s performance, people will be happy, but that’s as far as it’s going to go,” he said, adding that he doesn’t think Trump would order military action to apprehend Castro.

“Raúl Castro will not be extradited,” he added. “He will not do a perp walk. He will never see a courtroom in South Florida. He will die in Cuba.”

In response to a question about the indictment, Blanche said, “We indict men outside of this country all the time. The reason why we indict them like this is we want them here to face justice.”

A round of applause followed.

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