A United States federal grand jury has indicted Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, on four counts of murder and related charges stemming from the February 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American humanitarian organisation that flew search-and-rescue missions for rafters fleeing Cuba. The Cuban military’s destruction of the planes killed four US citizens. The indictment, filed in Miami, was reported by BBC News and NPR on 20 May 2026. President Trump said there would be “no escalation” with Cuba following the charges. Cuba’s government called the indictment an act of hypocrisy. US military jets and drones have been tracked near Cuban airspace in the days since. Raúl Castro, who relinquished formal power in 2021, is not in US custody and is vanishingly unlikely to ever stand trial.
The received wisdom
The progressive and liberal-internationalist critique of this indictment is predictable and not entirely wrong: it is a performative legal manoeuvre aimed at Cuban-American voters in Florida, it will do nothing to change conditions on the island, and it risks heating up a bilateral relationship that has been a useful back-channel in various regional crises. Serious Cuba hands — on both left and right — have long argued that the economic blockade has failed on its own terms, that engagement would produce more change than isolation, and that treating Cuba as an ideological battlefield rather than a small, poor country with a strategic location serves nobody’s interests particularly well. The 1996 shootdowns were a genuine atrocity. But indicting an elderly man who will never appear in a US courtroom is closer to political theatre than justice. The families of the four victims deserve better than a press release.
A different read
All of that is true, and yet the liberal critique misses something important about why the legal accountability argument still matters — and where it goes wrong.
The 1996 shootdown was not merely a Cuban internal affair or a Cold War skirmish. The Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were in international airspace — or, at minimum, near the boundary — when Cuban MiGs fired on them. Four American citizens were killed. The Clinton administration condemned the act, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act tightening the embargo within weeks, and the International Civil Aviation Organisation found that the shoot-down violated international aviation law. For thirty years, no one responsible has faced any legal consequence whatsoever. The indictment, whatever its tactical clumsiness, at least names the act for what it was.
The deeper problem is that the United States has never developed a coherent doctrine for holding foreign government officials accountable for crimes against American citizens short of war or regime change. The Castro indictment joins a long list of indictments-as-statements: Manuel Noriega (eventually extradited, exceptionally), Muammar Gaddafi (dead before trial), various Hezbollah officials, the occasional Venezuelan drug lord. In most cases, the legal instruments are real — the DOJ is not making up charges — but the strategic logic is missing. What outcome, exactly, is this indictment supposed to produce?
If the answer is “deterrence,” that ship sailed in 1996. If the answer is “justice for the families,” the indictment may feel meaningful but offers no path to an actual trial. If the answer is “political signal to Miami’s Cuban-American community,” that is cynical and most people know it. The troubling pattern is that Washington reaches for legal instruments — sanctions, indictments, asset freezes — as substitutes for the harder work of strategy. This is not a Trump-specific phenomenon; the Obama administration expanded the use of Treasury sanctions dramatically, and the Biden DOJ was active in using indictments against foreign officials. The tools have become a way of feeling like something is happening without committing to a policy.
Al Jazeera noted that the timing raises questions about geopolitical motivations — coming at a moment when Cuba has been in the news for other reasons and when the Trump administration has signalled interest in consolidating pressure on governments it considers hostile. The juxtaposition with Trump’s simultaneous claim that there will be “no escalation” is telling: the administration wants the domestic political benefit of a tough-on-Havana posture without actually committing to a Cuba policy. That is not strength — it is noise dressed as resolve.
The families of Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales — the four men killed in 1996 — deserve acknowledgement and, in a better world, justice. But they also deserve honesty: an indictment of a 94-year-old who will die in Havana is not justice. It is a symbolic act that releases political pressure without producing political change. Cuba policy has been symbolic acts for sixty years. The results are visible on the island.
What to watch
- Whether the US military movements near Cuba — jets and drones tracked near Cuban airspace since the indictment — escalate or are drawn down. This is the most concrete near-term risk.
- How the Cuban government responds beyond its initial statement: any move against US diplomatic personnel in Havana would signal a genuine deterioration.
- Whether Congress uses the indictment as leverage to tighten or loosen Helms-Burton restrictions — the law is the main instrument tying any administration’s hands on Cuba.
- Any back-channel diplomatic signalling: the history of US-Cuba relations is full of public confrontation masking quiet negotiation, and Trump’s “no escalation” comment may be a signal in that direction.
— J