The U.S. has indicted former Cuban President Raul Castro on murder charges, according to court records.
The Trump administration has been applying a pressure campaign to push 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 but 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, a DOJ official told Reuters last week.
Trump in a statement earlier on Wednesday called Cuba a “rogue state harboring hostile foreign military” and framed his administration’s actions regarding the Caribbean island as part of a broader effort to expand U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere.
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.
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 longtime Cold War rivals.
After taking power, Fidel Castro struck an alliance with the Soviet Union, then seized U.S.-owned businesses and properties. The U.S. 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 U.S. Attorney’s office is planning to host an event starting at 1 p.m. EDT to honor 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 7 years old.
The ceremony is due to take place on the anniversary of the end of a four-year U.S. 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.”
