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Former Cuban President Raúl Castro looks at the Cuban flag during his speech at the event celebrating the 65th anniversary of the triumph of the revolution in Santiago, Cuba, on January 1, 2024. (Ismael Francisco/AP via CNN Newsource)
By Evan Perez, CNN
(CNN) — The Justice Department’s criminal charges against former Cuban president Raúl Castro is a prosecution more than 30 years in the works, with federal prosecutors in Miami first drafting an indictment against him in the 1990s.
After three decades, criminal charges that were announced Wednesday at an event in Miami focusing on the 94-year-old Castro’s role — years before his presidency — as defense minister and alleged role in ordering the 1996 shoot down of two civilian aircraft belonging to the Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue, according to people briefed on the matter.
Four people, three of them Americans, were killed in the attack by two Cuban MiG fighters in international airspace. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the indictment at ceremony honoring the victims of the shootdown on a day that Cuban exiles celebrate as Cuba’s independence day.
Castro is charged with conspiracy to kill US nationals, destruction of an aircraft and four counts of murder. He is not in US custody at this time.
The original draft indictment, however, was built on the momentum of the successful prosecution of Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader convicted in 1992 of racketeering and drug trafficking.
“On the heels of the Noriega case, we frankly redoubled the efforts to move this case forward,” Guy Lewis, a former US Attorney in Miami, said of the early efforts in a telephone interview.
Years later, Lewis wrote a seven-page memo laying out a possible case against Castro that in recent months made its way to top Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The memo was originally prepared in 2016 and later sent to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But no case materialized — until now.
George Fowler, whose family fled Cuba when he was 9-years-old and is a longtime attorney representing the Cuban American National Foundation lobbying group, says he wrote to President Donald Trump and included Lewis’ memo to make the case for taking action against Castro.
“I’ve been trying to get the Castros indicted since I was 9-years-old,” Fowler said in an interview with CNN.
Lewis, who helped prosecute Noriega, says some of the investigation to prepare for the Noriega prosecution helped develop evidence that Castro, brother of then-Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and others in the Cuban government took millions in payments from Colombian cartel leaders to protect their shipments.
Those efforts to bring charges came to a halt after the Miami Herald reported on the indictment draft, Lewis recalls from the time.
A new effort took root after the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, as the FBI intensified its investigation of the Cuban intelligence spy ring that stretched from military installations in Miami and Tampa, to infiltrations of the Brothers to the Rescue group and even the offices of members of Congress.
The spy ring known as La Red Avispa, or Wasp Network, had planted Cuban intelligence officers inside Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, including the Brothers to the Rescue, which began as a group of airborne spotters who identified Cuban refugees who needed rescue at sea.
In a 2000 trial, five members of the Cuban spy ring, including its leader Gerardo Hernandez, were found guilty of espionage and other charges. A separate US indictment included murder and other charges against the Cuban MiG pilots and a Cuban general who allegedly ordered the unarmed civilian planes to be shot down.
Hernandez, then serving a life sentence in a US prison, was among a group that was returned to Cuba as part of a prisoner exchange in 2014, sparking outrage in south Florida, home of the largest Cuban-American community.
“My reaction was anger,” Lewis says. “It was like spitting in the face of these families and the memory of these men. Three US citizens who were murdered in cold blood.”
While the effort to charge Castro appeared to fizzle because of shifts in political priorities, prosecutors involved in the investigation and current officials say they never closed the books on the Castro brothers. The prisoner exchange helped spark a renewed push when Trump won the 2016 election.
David Buckner, who helped lead the Cuban espionage prosecution, said prosecutors looked into charging anyone involved in the murder of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots.
“We followed the evidence as far as it could take us,” he said. “We looked at everybody. Our goal was to obtain justice for these families.”
Buckner says that the investigation showed that the Cuban government carried out the attack as a message to dissidents on the island who at the time were gaining ground with funding from European governments.
At the time of the 1996 attack, Brothers to the Rescue planes were known to fly just outside Cuban airspace and release thousands of fliers with anti-Cuban government messages intended to reach Havana residents. On the day of the attack, spies in Miami had informed the Cuban military of the planned flight and had ensured that Hernandez, the ring leader, wasn’t on one of the planes, prosecutors said during the trial.
“This was not a one-off, it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, this was a planned out homicide,” Buckner said. “It was supposed to intimidate the people of Cuba.”
The-CNN-Wire
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