Cuba’s head of state has issued a scathing rejection of newly unveiled U.S. government accusations targeting former Cuban leader Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, framing the charges as a transparent display of Washington’s long-standing arrogance and mounting frustration over the Cuban Revolution’s unyielding principles and the unified moral standing of its leadership. In an official statement posted to the social platform X, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel underscored that the allegations are a purely politically motivated maneuver, completely devoid of any legitimate legal foundation.
Díaz-Canel argued the move is designed solely to prop up a manufactured narrative that Washington can use to justify what he called the reckless ambition of potential military aggression against Cuba. “The United States is lying,” he stated firmly, accusing U.S. authorities of deliberately distorting the facts surrounding the 1996 downing of aircraft belonging to the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue, which the Cuban government has long labeled a narco-terrorist organization.
The Cuban president emphasized that his country holds extensive, well-documented evidence proving that Havana did not act recklessly, nor did it violate international law when it downed the planes. He contrasted Cuba’s actions with the consistent pattern of U.S. military conduct, pointing to what he described as cold, premeditated, publicly acknowledged extrajudicial killings of civilian vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific regions carried out by American forces.
Díaz-Canel reaffirmed that the 1996 incident, which took place on February 24, was a clear exercise of legitimate self-defense within Cuba’s own territorial waters. He explained that the aircraft had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace in dangerous incursions organized by well-documented terrorists, and that the U.S. government in power at the time had been warned more than 12 times about the activity. Despite these repeated warnings, Washington chose to ignore the notifications and allowed the violations to continue.
He went on to defend Raúl Castro’s personal and professional legacy, noting that the veteran revolutionary leader’s long record of ethical leadership and commitment to human-centered values directly contradicts every slanderous claim leveled against him. Throughout his career as a guerrilla commander and head of state, Raúl Castro earned the profound love of the Cuban people, as well as widespread respect and admiration from global and regional leaders, Díaz-Canel added. These deeply rooted, widely recognized moral values, he concluded, serve as both the former leader’s strongest defense and an impenetrable moral shield against what he called the absurd effort to undermine his standing as a heroic figure in Cuban history.