The United States government is reportedly preparing criminal charges against Raúl Castro, the 93-year-old former President of Cuba who handed nominal power to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018 but has remained the real locus of authority in the Cuban Communist Party. BBC News reported this week that the US is planning to charge the ex-Cuban leader, while the Guardian noted that the threatened indictment represents a significant ratcheting up of US pressure on Havana. At almost exactly the same time, the Guardian also reported that CIA Director Bill Burns had met with Cuban officials in Havana — a back-channel engagement that the indictment threat would seem designed to undermine. The two moves are happening simultaneously, and they point in opposite directions.
The received wisdom
The progressive-liberal case against the Castro indictment strategy is well-rehearsed. International law scholars and human rights advocates will note that the United States has a patchy record on prosecuting foreign heads of state — and that selective prosecutions of adversaries, while ignoring allies who commit comparable abuses, undermine the universal application of justice that gives such prosecutions their moral force. Cuba, for all the horror of its security apparatus, has not invaded its neighbours. The human cost of the embargo — which independent economists argue has impoverished ordinary Cubans for sixty years — is rarely factored into American assessments of who bears responsibility for Cuban suffering. The indictment, in this reading, is domestic political theatre aimed at the Florida exile community and the Republican base, not a serious instrument of foreign policy.
There is genuine substance to this critique. The spectacle of US prosecutors charging a 93-year-old man who cannot be extradited and will never see a courtroom does seem more performative than consequential. And the CIA back-channel suggests that the adults in the room know that direct engagement with Havana is ultimately necessary if US interests — migration flows, regional stability, the question of Russian military presence on the island — are to be addressed.
A different read
But the left-liberal critique, while partially valid, misses something important about what maximum-pressure strategy is actually trying to do — and what the right critique of this particular application of it actually is.
The logic of indicting foreign leaders, when used consistently, is not primarily about courtroom outcomes. It is about delegitimization and asset freezing. The International Criminal Court’s indictments of Slobodan Milošević in 1999 — which critics at the time also dismissed as unenforceable — did constrain his travel options, did embarrass allied governments that might have dealt with him, and did establish a precedent that eventually contributed to his transfer to The Hague. The Pinochet arrest in London in 1998, under universal jurisdiction principles, similarly changed the calculus for former dictators who assumed comfortable retirement. There is a serious argument that visible international legal exposure for ageing autocrats creates deterrence effects for their successors, even when the original target dies in impunity.
The real problem with the Castro indictment strategy is not that it lacks legal or strategic logic in principle. It is that it is being pursued without a coherent theory of the end state. The CIA director’s simultaneous presence in Havana — presumably without Cuban officials being told that an indictment of their party’s founding figure was imminent — reveals the profound incoherence at the heart of the policy. You cannot simultaneously be conducting secret diplomatic engagement and threatening to criminalize the man you are implicitly engaging with. The two moves cancel each other out. Cuban hardliners read the indictment as confirmation that Washington will never offer a real deal. Cuban reformists who might have used the CIA channel to test whether a different relationship was possible are now politically exposed.
History suggests that successful coercive diplomacy requires clarity about what the coercion is intended to achieve. The maximum pressure campaign against Iran in 2018–2020 was criticized for exactly this reason: sanctions were tightened without a defined negotiating ladder, so Tehran had no path to relief even if it had wanted one. The result was Iranian nuclear programme acceleration and increased regional aggression, not capitulation. Cuba, a far weaker state but one with demonstrated capacity for decades-long resistance to US pressure, is an unlikely candidate to crack under the same approach.
There is a conservative case for a different Cuba policy — one grounded not in progressive squeamishness about prosecutions but in cold-eyed assessment of what works. The American policy of isolation has been in place since 1962 and Cuba remains communist. The brief Obama-era opening, whatever its imperfections, produced tangible movement: prisoner releases, limited economic reform, restored diplomatic channels. The Trump-era reversal of that opening restored the status quo of stalemate. Indicting a 93-year-old is a gesture that costs the United States diplomatic flexibility while producing no change in Cuban behaviour. Conservatives who are serious about rule-of-law values should want that legal authority used strategically, not spent on symbolic prosecutions that will never reach a verdict.
What to watch
Whether the CIA talks in Havana survive the indictment announcement will be the first signal of whether any coherent policy architecture exists behind the twin moves. A Cuban suspension of the back-channel would confirm the self-defeating dynamic.
Watch whether European Union members — who have maintained their own Cuba engagement framework — treat the indictment as a legal precedent worth supporting or as a unilateral US action to be distanced from. EU posture will shape whether the indictment has multilateral teeth or remains a domestic US legal manoeuvre.
The 2026 US midterm dynamics in Florida are a relevant subtext: Republican strategists in Tallahassee will be watching whether this plays in Cuban-American communities, which have been slowly diversifying politically as the original exile generation ages.
— J