Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Monday that he had obtained an arrest warrant for former Cuban President Raúl Castro on a charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, in connection with the Cuban Air Force’s 1996 shootdown of two planes operated by a Miami-based Cuban exile nonprofit called Brothers to the Rescue.
“It was not an accident what happened. It was murder,” Uthmeier said at a press conference. “The evidence makes abundantly clear that there was a conspiracy.”
Brothers to the Rescue flew private planes over the Florida Straits to aid Cuban migrants attempting to cross the waterway, often in makeshift vessels, and the organization regularly called the U.S. Coast Guard to rescue the refugees. In 1996, Cuban forces shot down two U.S.-registered, unarmed Cessna 337 Skymasters, operated by Brothers to the Rescue, and killed four Cuban-American men.
Uthmeier added that spies who reported to the Castro regime “infiltrated both the Brothers to the Rescue as well as American government offices, spreading from the Keys up to Miami and throughout South Florida.”
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Raúl Castro led Cuba from 2008 to 2018 after succeeding his brother Fidel Castro, who was the country’s longtime communist dictator. Raúl Castro, who is now 95, called for the planes to be shot down, Uthmeier said.
Florida officials will not be “parading him into the jails today, at least to my knowledge,” Uthmeier said, but the state arrest warrant still has “real consequences.”
“He certainly doesn’t have the pleasure to just leave his country and move about freely,” the attorney general added. “If he ends up in a friendly country for whatever reason with extradition agreements, then he will end up here.”
Castro is already facing federal charges in connection with the Cuban military attack on the aircraft, but Uthmeier noted that it’s particularly important to pursue this state-level prosecution.
“If you have a communist sympathizer that ends up back in the White House, they cannot pardon, they cannot commute, they cannot immunize these dictators from our state proceedings,” Uthmeier said.
Uthmeier made the announcement in the C.A.M.P. 4 Justice Courtroom at the Florida International University College of Law, which is dedicated to the men killed when the planes went down.
Castro is not the first Latin American leader to be hit with charges in the U.S. since Trump returned to the White House last year — American forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas in January, and he is currently being held in a detention center in New York on federal criminal charges in connection with drug trafficking, weapons offenses and torture plots against some of his political opponents.
Maduro and his wife have pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against them. Last week, Maduro told a Manhattan federal court that any charges that he and his wife had allegedly tortured detainees in Venezuela were based on “false accusations and false testimony.”
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