Former Cuban President Raúl Castro in 2016. Photo by Ismael Francisco/Flickr.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, before a cheering crowd of Cuban exile luminaries in Miami’s Freedom Tower, acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the “historic” indictment of 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges of ordering the murders of four American nationals 30 years ago.

The charges relate to a 1996 incident in which Castro, then the defence minister, allegedly ordered Cuban MiGs to shoot down unarmed civilian aircraft operated by the Miami-based “humanitarian” organization, Brothers to the Rescue, in the Straits of Florida.

Like the press conference itself, the unsealed 26-page grand jury indictment was long on rhetoric but short on context.

One could easily start with the 67-year-and-counting campaigns by various US administrations to overthrow the Cuban government through assassinations, invasions, and support for countless exile plots to blow up passenger-carrying aircraft, bomb tourist hotels, and wreak other assorted acts of calculated mayhem.

But let’s begin closer to the scene, and time, of “the crime.”

While researching What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, I spent a good deal of time investigating the backstory to the shootdown of those planes. Gerardo Hernandez, one of the Five, was ultimately charged, convicted and sentenced to a double-life-plus 15-year sentence for what turned out to be his lack of any direct involvement in the decision to shoot down those planes.

What follows is based on that research. The excerpts are from the book.

On November 10, 1994, on what seemed at the time like a whim, a frustrated José Basulto, the founder of Brothers to the Rescue, changed course on a flight from the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, back to Miami.

Basulto suddenly had an idea. Instead of flying north, he banked the plane to the left and headed—illegally—into Cuban airspace. Why not? It was there.

Basulto’s frustration was understandable. A Bay of Pigs veteran who’d been personally involved in armed attacks against Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, Basulto had seemingly found a new role for himself by the early 1990s. He and pilots from Brothers to the Rescue, the organization he founded, flew highly publicized patrols over the Straits of Florida, spotting and helping to rescue hundreds of Cubans trying to make their way to Florida and their promised special path to US citizenship in rickety rafts. The publicity was good for Brothers’ reputation, and that reputation was good for fundraising. That was until:

On September 9, 1994, the Clinton administration announced it had struck a deal with the Cubans. The United States would no longer automatically allow Cubans picked up in the Straits to come to America—a reversal of its decades-old policy. Instead, rafters intercepted at sea would be dispatched to “safe haven” camps in Panama or Guantanamo… In future, to accommodate ordinary Cubans who did want to immigrate, the US agreed to legally admit no fewer than 20,000 of them each year, but through normal channels. In exchange, Cuba promised to use “persuasive methods” to discourage its citizens from trying to make their way by sea.

The new US-Cuba agreement, of course, had also had an unintended consequence for Brothers to the Rescue. Suddenly, it had no one to rescue. Once the rafters realized they would be shipped off to Guantanamo or Panama if Brothers’ pilots notified the Coast Guard of their coordinates, they began angrily waving off their would-be saviours the moment they spotted one of their aircraft overhead. And with no one to rescue—and no publicity for having done it—donations had also begun to dry up… In 1993, at the height of the rafters’ crisis, Brothers to the Rescue had raised nearly a million dollars in public contributions. After the 1994 agreement, it took in less........

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