The U.S. Justice Department’s federal indictment of 94-year-old former President Raúl Castro arrives amid the Trump administration’s renewed maximum-pressure campaign against Cuba, a strategy characterized by severe energy blockades and subsequent island-wide power outages. On Wednesday, the U.S. charged Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals in connection to the 1996 shootdown of two unarmed “Brothers to the Rescue” civilian aircraft.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel quickly rejected the legal action. Díaz-Canel categorized the federal indictment as a “political action without any legal basis” intended to justify the “folly of a military aggression against Cuba.”
Castro served as Cuba’s Defense Minister during the 1996 incident, where he ordered Russian-made Cuban MiGs to destroy the two planes, resulting in four deaths. Defending the historical military order, Díaz-Canel stated the action was an act of legitimate self-defense against “notorious terrorists” who regularly violated Cuban airspace.
Following the announcement of the arrest warrant, the United States initiated a naval deployment of the aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships into the southern Caribbean Sea.
The standoff draws direct parallels to January 2026, when U.S. forces used a drug-trafficking indictment as the legal pretext to raid Caracas and capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Addressing the current charges, Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche stated the government expects Castro to face court “by his own will or by another way.”