On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-old former Cuban head of state Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill US citizens. It’s a move that may signal potential military action to abduct Castro from the country, as with Donald Trump’s January raid on the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The indictment targets Raúl Castro, the brother of the late Fidel, and five other members of the Cuban military, for the 1991 downing by Cuban forces of two aircraft operated by anticommunist Cuban exiles. While the indictment was filed last month, the unsealing coincides with Cuban Independence Day, celebrating 124 years since the US ended its military occupation of the country.

But Cuban Independence Day comes this year amid a debilitating oil blockade imposed by Trump, which has devastated Cuba’s already struggling health system and economic infrastructure and worsened living conditions across the board. This year alone, residents have dealt with nationwide blackouts, food shortages, hospitals without power to operate, and constant worry over their economic and political future. The Trump blockade and associated policies, which many humanitarian groups view as human rights violations, have deprived the country’s residents of basic necessities and exacerbated the impact of the decades-long US embargo on its neighbor.

“The paradox is, the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ ”

Cuba produces enough oil to meet about 40 percent of its needs domestically. It imports the remainder, mostly from Venezuela and Mexico. But following the US attack on Venezuela and additional tariffs imposed on countries that sell or provide oil to Cuba, both countries halted oil exports to the island. And while the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, the president continued his naval blockade on Cuba, seizing many vessels that have sought to ship goods to, or that have simply been linked to, the country.

According to a March report by the Atlantic, the US attorney’s office in South Florida is building further indictments against Cuba’s military and government leadership, including Castro family members. The US cited a 2020 indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to justify his capture in January. In the week prior to the report, Trump said he believed that he would have “the honor of taking Cuba.”

And earlier, at the end of his first term, Trump added Cuba to the federal list of state sponsors of terrorism, a policy that “put the brakes on some private investment on the island,” Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations told me in an April email. “And [it] did no favors to tourism, which the Cuban regime had made the island’s economic engine.”

The Biden administration largely carried on Trump’s Cuba policy,........

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