Escalating long-standing political pressure on Cuba’s communist government, the United States is moving forward with plans to indict 94-year-old Raul Castro, the island nation’s former president and younger brother of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, multiple US media outlets reported Thursday. The development marks a sharp new turn in a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the two neighboring countries, which has deepened amid widespread crippling power outages across Cuba traced back to a strict fuel blockade imposed by the Trump administration.
Donald Trump, who served as US president from 2017 to 2021, has repeatedly made clear his goal of forcing the collapse of Cuba’s communist government, a stance that has guided his administration’s sweeping reversal of diplomatic detente built by his predecessor. Raul Castro, who stepped into the national presidency following Fidel Castro’s retirement, oversaw the landmark 2015 normalization of relations between Washington and Havana brokered under the Obama administration—an historic breakthrough that unraveled completely after Trump took office.
According to reporting from CBS News, which cited unnamed senior US officials with direct knowledge of internal deliberations, the potential indictment centers on the 1996 downing of two small civilian aircraft piloted by anti-Castro activists. At the time of the incident, Cuban authorities stated the planes had violated Cuban airspace, a claim that has remained a point of contention between the two countries for nearly three decades.
When reached for comment by Agence France-Presse following the media reports, the US Department of Justice declined to provide any immediate confirmation or response on the matter. The looming legal action against Raul Castro, who retired from the Cuban presidency in 2018 and stepped down as head of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2021, comes as Cuban residents continue to grapple with widespread economic instability and infrastructure failures worsened by decades of US trade sanctions.