The drumbeats of possible U.S. war against Cuba just got noticeably louder.
A federal grand jury in Florida on Wednesday indicted 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals. The charges stem from orders he allegedly gave as defense minister in 1996 to shoot down two civilian rescue aircraft that were searching for Cubans fleeing the island on rafts. The downing of the planes killed three U.S. citizens and one U.S. permanent resident.
The drumbeats of possible U.S. war against Cuba just got noticeably louder.
A federal grand jury in Florida on Wednesday indicted 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals. The charges stem from orders he allegedly gave as defense minister in 1996 to shoot down two civilian rescue aircraft that were searching for Cubans fleeing the island on rafts. The downing of the planes killed three U.S. citizens and one U.S. permanent resident.
The U.S. Justice Department’s decision to bring charges against Castro now for an incident that occurred 30 years ago has led to fears that the Trump administration aims to use the indictment as a pretext to attack Cuba—similar to the playbook used in Venezuela to capture then-President Nicolás Maduro in January.
And, indeed, that’s precisely what some Republican lawmakers in Florida are now openly calling for.
“I think that’s exactly what should happen; that’s exactly what is good for the United States,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who spoke alongside fellow South Florida Republicans at a House of Representatives press conference in Washington on Wednesday. “We cannot have these thieves running that island any longer because we know that they have given a platform to our enemies for years: Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, China, and Russia.”
Castro formally stepped down as president in 2018 and was succeeded by Miguel Díaz-Canel, the country’s current leader. However, the Castro family, including through Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, retains significant influence over Cuba’s one-party authoritarian government.
Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, the son of a prominent Cuban exile, was more restrained than Salazar. “I think that Raúl Castro should be brought to justice, but again that’s up to the president of the United States,” he said.
However, Díaz-Balart and the other lawmakers also cited a recent Axios report that Havana possesses hundreds of attack drones received from Iran and Russia to argue that Cuba was a national security threat to the United States.
“Those 300 drones, if they’re anything like the ones that are used in the Ukrainian war [by Russia] or actually right now that Iran is using, they have the ability to reach just about any part of the southeast United States; and so that’s why Cuba poses a direct threat to the United States,” Diaz-Balart said, though he added that the U.S. military had the capability to shoot down the drones.
In a Monday post on social platform X, Cuba’s president warned of a “bloodbath with incalculable consequences” if the Trump administration made good on its growing threats. The administration has already instituted a devastating blockade of energy supplies going into Cuba that has dramatically worsened the humanitarian situation on the island.
“Cuba, which already endures a multidimensional aggression from the U.S., does have the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military onslaught,” Díaz-Canel said.
Salazar, also the daughter of Cuban exiles, said she didn’t think “the Castros” would “dare” to use drones to retaliate against U.S. troops in the event of a U.S. military operation. “I do not know what the premise of war is going to do, but we do know that the Castros know better, and I do not believe that they would dare to do that because it would be something terribly bad for them, which I cannot go into,” she said.
Díaz-Balart, who chairs the House spending committee with responsibility for foreign aid, said in a separate interview with Foreign Policy that it was “premature” to predict a U.S. operation similar to the one that seized Maduro. But he said that the U.S. military had plenty of available assets to carry one out, even with so many U.S. ships and planes currently deployed in the Middle East and focused on the war against Iran.
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration has the appetite to take on such an operation right now, let alone concrete plans to do so. But there’s no question that Cuba is on the administration’s mind. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put out a Spanish-language video with English captions on X blaming the worsening humanitarian situation in Cuba on the island’s negligent government.
“I know that today, you who call the island your home are going through unimaginable hardships,” Rubio said. “The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil ‘blockade’ by the U.S. … The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel, or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”
