Former Cuban President Raul Castro has been indicted in the United States on murder charges, court records showed yesterday, in a major escalation in Washington’s pressure campaign against the island’s Communist government.
Cuba’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Castro, 94, last appeared in public in Cuba earlier this month, and there is no evidence that he has since left the island or that the government would allow him to be extradited.
The indictment comes as US President Donald Trump has pushed for a regime change in Cuba, where Castro’s Communists have been in charge since his late brother Fidel Castro led a revolution in 1959.
The details of the charges were not immediately available. A US Justice Department official told Reuters last week on the condition of anonymity that the charges against him are expected to be based on a 1996 incident in which Cuban jets shot down planes operated by a group of Cuban exiles.
Trump in a statement earlier in the day called Cuba a ‘rogue state harbouring hostile foreign military’ and framed his administration’s actions regarding the Caribbean island as part of a broader effort to expand US influence in the Western Hemisphere.
“From the shores of Havana to the banks of the Panama Canal, we will drive out the forces of lawlessness and crime and foreign encroachment,” Trump said at a Coast Guard Academy event in New London, Connecticut.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Monday that the island does not represent a threat.
The indictment marks a new low in relations between the long-time Cold War rivals.
After taking power, Fidel Castro struck an alliance with the Soviet Union, then seized US-owned businesses and properties. The US has since maintained an economic embargo on the nation of about 10 million.
The two sides have talked intermittently over the years. Diplomatic relations briefly improved during former Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term, but Trump, a Republican, has taken a harder line.
The Miami US Attorney’s office is planning to host an event starting to honour victims of the 1996 incident. The Justice Department said on Tuesday it would make an announcement in conjunction with the ceremony, but did not provide details about the announcement.
Members of Miami’s large Cuban-American community gathered outside the city’s freedom tower, where the ceremony is due to take place.
“We all hoped for a long time, for many years that this would happen,” said Bobby Ramirez, a 62-year-old musician who left Cuba in 1971 when he was seven years old.
The ceremony is due to take place on the anniversary of the end of a four-year US military occupation of Cuba on May 20, 1902, which itself followed centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Cuba’s government does not consider the date to mark the country’s independence day, arguing that it remained subservient to Washington until the 1959 revolution.
In a post on X, Diaz-Canel said that in Cuban history, May 20 signified ‘intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration’.
Under Trump, the US has effectively imposed a blockade on Cuba by threatening sanctions on countries supplying it with fuel, triggering power outages and exacerbating its worst crisis in decades.
In a video message addressed to the Cuban people yesterday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents were Cuban immigrants to the United States, offered to forge a new relationship between the two countries. He said the US could provide $100 million in aid, and blamed Cuba’s leaders for shortages.
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