The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged former Cuban President Raúl Castro (2008-2018) for the shootdown of two "humanitarian aid" aircraft on February 24, 1996, during his tenure as the island’s Minister of Defense. The level of mendacity and the twisting of reality are no longer surprising coming from a DOJ that, this same week, ordered the release of nearly $1.8 billion in "compensation" for being prosecuted to the individuals who, on January 6, 2021, stormed the Capitol, assaulted police officers, made death threats against lawmakers, and committed other acts of irrational savagery with the aim of breaking the American institutional order.

It is as false to portray the failed coup plotters incited by Donald Trump as victims as it is to pretend that Cuba was the aggressor in the incident that occurred more than 30 years ago. To begin with, the Cessna 337s were not performing any humanitarian work; they were operated by an anti-Cuban terrorist group based in Miami, which had participated in paramilitary actions since 1959, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and several assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. For 20 months, the formation led by former CIA agent José Basulto invaded Cuban airspace, both to provoke the authorities and to drop counter-revolutionary propaganda. Every illegal action was documented by Havana and reported to the U.S. State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as to the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization. Basulto himself recruited the NBC television network to document his criminal actions, making it impossible to claim that the United States was unaware of this history.

The fact that 30 years have passed between the events and the indictment shows that every American president from Bill Clinton (in power in 1996), through George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump in his first term, and up to Joe Biden, was aware that Cuba made a legitimate use of its right to protect its airspace and that the only crime to be prosecuted was that of the Miami ultra-right, who, of course, remained unpunished. Thus, the charges against one of the historical leaders of the Cuban Revolution can only be understood in the context of the growing rupture between Trumpist discourse and reality—evidenced by his repeated, fantastical assertions that his country’s military forces defeated Iran—the installation of a foreign policy based undisguisedly on obtaining spoils for the ruling class, and the capture of the U.S. judicial apparatus by prosecutors and judges divorced from legality.

Although it would be an atrocious crime, an eventual kidnapping of Raúl Castro by order of the White House—similar to that suffered by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are still captive in the United States—would not have the former leader or the Cuban people as its primary victim, but the entire planet. To allow Washington’s continued arbitrariness would mean completely renouncing the last vestiges of international legality and accepting that any person, anywhere, is at the mercy of the whims of a sadistic tycoon who holds the nuclear button in his hands. These circumstances demand a global closing of ranks with Cuba, as well as a generalized rejection of the homicidal harassment imposed by the United States on the Caribbean nation.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff