Lawmakers call for Raul Castro to be indicted
Members of Congress have called for former Cuban President Raul Castro to be indicted on charges related to the 1996 shooting of two civilian planes.
When Cuban leader Raul Castro welcomed President Barack Obama to Havana in 2016, it was a historic resumption of diplomatic ties announced a year earlier with the longtime Cold War adversaries and a rare window for change.
Castro, who took over from his charismatic revolutionary brother Fidel, wanted to lift the U.S. embargo. President Obama wanted economic reform and human rights reform. Some saw it as an opportunity to guide Cuba toward a Vietnam-like model of communist rule and economic prosperity.
“He had a huge opportunity,” said Sebastian Arcos, interim director of the Cuba Institute at Florida International University. But that wasn’t the case.
Whether Raul Castro was keen on reform or staying in power, his voice was silenced in 2017 when US President Donald Trump blocked any efforts to improve relations and began ratcheting up pressure on the island nation.
Now, the pressure is squarely on Castro. Castro is the last surviving historical leader since the revolution. He is 94 years old, visibly frail, and rules a country that faces daily power outages.
On May 20, the Justice Department dismissed the murder indictment against the former Cuban president. The United States has indicted Mr. Castro on four counts of murder, accusing him of ordering a Cuban military jet to shoot down a civilian plane operated by an exiled Cuban support group in 1996, killing four people on board.
This could foreshadow U.S. military action to remove Castro, as happened in Venezuela, where U.S. forces arrested and extracted former President Nicolas Maduro. The United States also recently proposed an economic agreement if things change.
The indictment and U.S. pressure are a dramatic late-stage chapter for a leader who has worked for decades in the shadow of Fidel, the organizer and administrator behind the flashy orator.
Many were skeptical that he would be able to take over the reins after Fidel Castro resigned, but Raul Castro turned out to be a more skilled political chess player than expected.
He rallied military and economic might behind him, made several economic reforms, and agreed to a historic breakthrough with Obama, while seeking to maintain Cuba’s status as the hemisphere’s communist powerhouse.
Despite his age, Mr. Castro is seen as having influence over the government and its revolutionary legacy. However, his ultimate goal is now in question.
From younger brother to revolutionary minister of defense
Raul Castro grew up with his older brother in the 1930s in Bilan, Cuba, a small village in eastern Cuba. He was in his 20s when he and Fidel Castro landed in exile in 1956 as part of a group of dozens of revolutionaries crammed into a 60-foot boat called the Granma.
Raúl was one of only 12 fighters to reach safety in the Sierra Maestra Mountains after the government discovered and attacked them. There, Castro led a guerrilla war that ended three years later in 1959 with the overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Although he has always been a quiet figure compared to the charismatic Fidel, he became known for his ruthless example. In 1959, he oversaw the execution of dozens of Batista officers and supporters in Santiago de Cuba.
A victorious Fidel Castro further alienated the United States by nationalizing American-owned businesses and real estate and allying with the Soviet Union, sparking a decades-long Cold War conflict.
Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba expert at the National Security Archives and author of “The Reverse Route to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” said Raul Castro spent decades as his brother’s defense minister, playing the role of second-hand cigar-smoking “comandante maximo.”
“He was to Fidel what Robert Kennedy was to John Kennedy,” Kornbluh said.
In 1961, Castro helped stop the Kennedy administration-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, often carrying out his brother’s wishes. “Fidel didn’t care about anything except his image. Raul was more realistic,” Arcos said.
As Minister of Defense, Raul Castro oversaw Cuba’s foreign military interventions, particularly in Africa, including Angola. He was a liaison with communist leaders in the Soviet bloc.
He was still in office during the “special period” of the early 1990s, a time of shortages and rationing when the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off fiscal subsidies and caused severe economic struggles. Meanwhile, the United States tightened its embargo on Cuba. The past decade has been a decade of deadly gunfire related to U.S. indictments.
According to a 2006 article in El Nuevo Herald, audio recordings show Raul Castro admitting to giving the order to shoot down a Cessna piloted by Brothers to the Rescue.
“I told them (Mig pilots) to try to shoot them down over (Cuban) territory, but they (rescue brother planes) would enter Havana and leave,” a voice purportedly belonging to Raul Castro said in the recording. “Of course, with air-to-air missiles, it’s going to be a fireball and it’s going to hit the city. … Well, if they show up again, knock them into the ocean.”
The previous year, Kornbluh said, Cuban officials repeatedly asked the United States to halt provocative flights that began by spotting Cuban rafters and later dropped leaflets over Cuba. Some U.S. officials tried unsuccessfully to stop the flight.
Cuban Air Force MIG fighter jets shot down two planes. The third person, José Basulto, 85, the founder of the Miami-based asylum group Brothers to the Rescue, escaped.
Former Cuban President Raul Castro indicted over 1996 incident
Former Cuban President Raul Castro has been indicted. He is accused of ordering the downing of a plane operated by a humanitarian group in 1996.
more: The pilot fled. Four friends disappeared. The US is now considering indicting Raul Castro
reluctant reformer
Raul finally stepped out of the shadows in 2008 when he was officially appointed president after the aging Fidel Castro fell ill, but he was not a very flashy figure.
Adolfo García, a multinational lawyer who works in Cuba with Brown Rudnick, said the Cuban economy continued to shrink in the 2010s despite oil subsidies from ally Venezuela.
Raul Castro, long considered an ideologue by Cuban scholars, played the role of a realist in building friendly relations with the United States under President Obama.
“It was a very difficult time economically for Cuba,” Garcia said. “And I think Raul Castro saw an opportunity, or an opening. In a way, I decided to have his cake and eat it too. To be able to maintain (power) without changing the government, without changing the regime, without changing the system.”
Garcia remembers that during President Obama’s tenure, he and others were inundated with companies looking to invest in tourism, biotech, fiber optics and health care.
Kornbluh said there have been years of economic growth, private sector expansion and U.S. cooperation on issues such as drugs and immigration. But Cuba has also been slow to license U.S. companies that want to set up shop in Cuba.
Former national security adviser and diplomat John Bolton suspects that Raul Castro was interested in striking a deal that satisfied Cuba’s desire for democracy.
Around the same time, Castro was expanding his GAESA group, a conglomerate with military ties and involvement in various industries. It has been subject to recent US sanctions.
Over time, Raul implemented reforms, albeit less democratic ones, such as the expansion of small private enterprises. Kornbluh said he helped expand access to the internet and changed rules and rhetoric about immigration, long known as “gusanos,” or worms. He saw the potential for them to support the nation by sending money.
Problems persisted, with the economy stagnant and Cubans still seeking deportation.
By 2018, Raul had resigned as president but retained significant power within Cuba’s Communist Party, military and state institutions, according to Reuters. Miguel Díaz-Canel was appointed president and was widely thought, and still is, to answer to Castro.
Although Raul Castro is likely not making most of the day-to-day decisions, Kornbluh said he still has “historic influence over decisions about the country’s governance system and its future.”
Castro’s final phase
CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently met with Cuban officials, including Raul’s grandson and intelligence official Raul Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “Laurito,” to issue an ultimatum to Trump on economic and security demands.
It happened at a time when Cuba was completely running out of diesel and fuel oil. The power outage lasted for most of the day. President Trump said Cuba would be “next” after Venezuela. 
Mr. Castro last appeared in public on May 1, International Labor Day, wearing military uniform alongside Mr. Díaz-Canel, but appeared tired and suddenly had to sit down during the ceremony, Reuters reported.
Bolton, a former national security adviser and diplomat, said he views Raul Castro as a revolutionary ideologue who has stuck with American interests for too long.
“I don’t think he’ll reach a deal,” Bolton said, adding that he believed “the administration is buying time in hopes of getting more concessions.”
Prior to the indictment, Bolton telegraphed that the Trump administration was looking at the Venezuelan blueprint.
“Obviously, I think what the administration is thinking about is implementing the same strategy that they implemented against President Maduro in Venezuela,” he said. “And I don’t know if it works the same way. Things are different.”
Bolton acknowledged that the country’s economic situation is difficult and protests continue. Nevertheless, Cubans, both on the island and abroad, may be less inclined to accept changes in leadership that fall short of overthrowing the entire regime.
more: President Trump says he is confident in agreement with Cuba
He also suspects that Cuba’s current presidents, Miguel Díaz Canel or Raul Castro, may be inclined to surrender like Maduro.
“Especially looking at what happened with Mr. Maduro, Miguel Díaz Canal is not going to step up and say, ‘Okay, okay, I’m happy to go to the United States as a hostage,’ and I don’t think Raul Castro is going to do that either,” Bolton said.
Arcos said Cuba likely protected Castro. “Since January 3, when the United States removed Mr. Maduro, they must have dug a very deep hole to keep Mr. Raul out,” he said.
Still, at a time when there was “no food, no housing, no medicine,” said Andy Gomez, a former Cuban studies professor at the University of Miami, “the frustration of the Cuban people is huge. Well, they don’t have a solution. Raul has no way to solve it.”
Photos of Fidel Castro are ubiquitous throughout Cuba, but photos of Raul Castro are far fewer.
Kornblau said Trump “wants to be the president who can say he decapitated the Cuban revolution after all his predecessors going back to Eisenhower failed,” but said such a move would come with high risks. “For better or worse, Raul Castro is the last living historical symbol of the Cuban revolution,” he said.
Mr. Castro recently released a message declaring that he is “with one foot in the stirrup and ready to charge with a machete,” CyberCuba reported, calling him “another warrior against the enemy and against our own mistakes.” 
Contributed by: Reuters, USA TODAY reporter Rick Jervis
