Three decades after Cuban fighter jets blew two small exile planes out of the sky, Florida has put its own name on the case against Raúl Castro. At a press event on the FIU campus on Monday, the state’s top prosecutor, James Uthmeier, presented the paperwork: a Miami judge has authorised the arrest of the former Cuban leader for allegedly plotting the killings, a first-degree felony under state law. The warrant bears the signature of Ariana Fajardo Orshan, head of the local circuit court, and allows no bail.
Everything goes back to a winter day in 1996, the 24th of February. Volunteers of Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami group that scanned the Florida Straits for rafters fleeing the island, took off that day in three Cessnas. Two were hit by missiles fired from Cuban MiGs, and all four men aboard died: three US citizens and one legal resident. American and UN investigators later concluded that the Cessnas had been flying outside Cuban airspace. At that time the military was run by Raúl, younger brother of Fidel; he is 95 today.
Why a state case on top of a federal one? According to the affidavit, Cuban intelligence officers stationed in Miami and in Key West had slipped into the exile group and sent its flight details to Havana. Prosecutors say that spying on Florida soil gives the state jurisdiction. The US Justice Department had already indicted Castro and five others back in May.
Nobody expects to see him in handcuffs. Uthmeier conceded that Castro would hardly “march himself into Miami”, but argued the warrant shrinks the list of countries he can visit without risk. Havana answered with contempt: President Miguel Díaz-Canel called it a “pathetic” show put on with one eye on the election.
Some critics in Florida see it the same way. Uthmeier’s Democratic rival in the race for attorney general, José Javier Rodriguez, accused him of timing the announcement to the opening of early voting, and FIU political scientist Eduardo Gamarra called it “a great political show” without much policy weight. For the families of the four pilots, though, the warrant mainly signals that their loss has not been filed away and forgotten.
