Report: U.S. Might Attack Cuba. DOJ Indicts Raúl Castro for Murder for ’96 Plane Shoot-downs.

Apparently not satisfied with the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and a war on Iran, the Trump administration is preparing for war against Cuba.

Citing U.S. officials, Politico reported on Monday that President Donald Trump and his aides are frustrated that economic pressure on the communist regime, notably an embargo of Venezuelan oil, is as yet fruitless. Thus, Trump is “increasingly willing” to attack the island of 10 million people.

Supporting that notion is today’s indictment of Cuban dictator Raúl Castro and other Cuban officials for murder in connection with downing two civilian aircraft in 1996.

The Indictment

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced today that a federal grand jury returned an indictment against the 94-year-old Cuban communist dictator on April 23.

Four Americans who flew civilian aircraft for Brothers to the Rescue went down on February 24, 1996. BTTR ran humanitarian rescue missions for those attempting to flee communist Cuba across the Florida Straits, the 93-mile stretch that separates Key West from the Caribbean prison island.

The indictment alleges that Cuban spies infiltrated BTTR in the early 1990s and “detailed information about its flight operations back to the Cuban government,” DOJ reported in a news release:

These reports were allegedly used by military leadership in planning the Feb. 24, 1996 operation.

The superseding indictment charges conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder.

That February 24, three planes were heading toward Cuba when Cuban fighter jets, under Castro’s chain of command, “fired air‑to‑air missiles at two unarmed civilian Cessna aircraft — destroying them without warning while they were flying outside Cuban territory, killing four U.S. nationals, including three U.S. citizens: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales.”

Before the attack, the indictment alleges, Cuban pilots trained to spot and intercept “slow-moving civilian aircraft.”

Aside from Castro, brother of late Cuban communist tyrant Fidel Castro, the defendants are Lorenzo Alberto Perez‑Perez, Emilio José Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raul Simanca Cardenas, and Luis Raul Gonzalez‑Pardo Rodriguez. The latter awaits sentencing here for immigration fraud. In November last year, authorities indicted him for lying about his military training to obtain a visa to enter the United States.

“My message today is clear,” Blanche said. “The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.”

The Cubans could be executed or land in prison for life if convicted.

As a practical matter, the indictment is meaningless unless Trump orders U.S. forces to capture Castro and his gang as he did with Maduro.

Attack on Cuba Ahead?

The indictment raises the obvious question of whether the U.S. indeed plans to attack Cuba, as disclosed by Politico.

“I am told it is increasingly willing to take such a step,” writer Nahal Toosi wrote on Monday:

That’s a significant escalation from a few months ago, when officials were primarily focused on using economic and diplomatic pressure to squeeze the communist regime in Havana.

Trump and his aides are “frustrated that the U.S. pressure campaign, which includes starving the island of fuel, has not led Cuba’s leaders to agree to significant economic and political reforms,” Toosi continued.

That means an attack might be ahead.

“The mood has definitely changed,” a source told the writer:

The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.

The attack would not use Cuban exiles, apropos of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Another military adventure might finish off what’s left of Trump’s popularity with his MAGA supporters. They’re already furious about high gas and other prices. 

“The size of a Cuba operation, if there is one, could come down to what he feels his MAGA backers will tolerate,” the Politico report continued:

“They could try to do a pretty small operation, but if that’s what they’re thinking they may be overestimating again what they could accomplish,” said Brian Latell, a former senior CIA official who dealt with Cuba.

Whatever the U.S. might accomplish, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez warned that it will be costly … in blood.

“The threat itself already constitutes an international crime,” he wrote on X of a possible attack:

If it were to materialize, it would trigger a bloodbath with incalculable consequences, plus the destructive impact on regional peace and stability.

Cuba poses no threat, nor does it have aggressive plans or intentions against any country. It has none against the U.S., nor has it ever had any — something the government of that nation knows full well, particularly its defense and national security agencies.

In fact, Che Guevara, a certified psychopath and Fidel Castro’s communist sidekick, told the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper in England, that if Cuba had controlled the nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union secretly placed in Cuba in 1962, they would have fired them at the United States.

The mass murder of millions was an easy price to pay, Guevara said, for communist liberation from “imperialist aggression.”