Florida has charged former Cuban President Raúl Castro with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the 1996 shootdown of civilian planes that killed four Americans, a case Havana dismisses as political theater.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the state charge on Monday, accusing Castro of directing spies to infiltrate the Miami exile group Brothers to the Rescue and ordering the attack on their aircraft. The new count of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder builds on a federal indictment unsealed earlier this year and aims to keep pressure on the 95-year-old former dictator still believed to hold power behind the scenes in Havana.
The Associated Press reported that the Florida complaint tracks the same core facts as the federal case: Cuban MiGs destroyed two unarmed Cessnas well outside Cuba’s territorial waters on Feb. 24, 1996, killing four occupants after the planes left Opa-Locka Airport in Miami-Dade County.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones backed the state move at a news conference, tying it directly to the earlier federal case.
Quiñones said:
"Our historic federal indictment laid the groundwork, and James and his team have now taken the important step of bringing charges under Florida law."
That federal indictment, announced in May, charged Castro with murder and destruction of an airplane for the same 1996 attack. The New York Post reported a grand jury returned the federal charges on April 23 against Castro and five co-defendants, naming the victims as Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.
Federal counts included conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. Defendants face up to life in prison or the death penalty. One co-defendant, Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez, was already in U.S. custody when the federal case was announced.
According to the state complaint, Castro was then Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and First Vice President of Cuba when he gave the final authorization to shoot down the planes. Cuban Directorate of Intelligence agents operating as part of the Wasp Network in the Miami area and the Florida Keys had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and reported flight plans, investigators said.
On the day of the attack, three unarmed Cessnas departed Opa-Locka. Cuban MiGs destroyed two of them with air-to-air missiles. Both aircraft were traveling away from Cuba and received no warning despite contact with Havana air traffic control, U.S. officials said.
Just the News reported the federal indictment alleges Castro authorized deadly force while leading Cuba’s military, and that orders ran through the Cuban military chain of command with Raúl and Fidel Castro as the final decision makers.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the federal case as a long-delayed reckoning.
Blanche said:
"For nearly 30 years, 30 years, the families of four murdered Americans have waited for justice."
He also said senior leadership of the Cuban regime had, for the first time in nearly 70 years, been charged in the United States for acts of violence that killed American citizens. Blanche added that President Trump is committed to a simple principle: if you kill Americans, the United States will pursue you, no matter the title or how much time has passed.
Uthmeier said the arrest warrant will restrict Castro’s ability to leave the island and block travel to any country with a U.S. extradition agreement. Whether Castro ever appears in an American courtroom remains unclear. He is 95, still in Cuba, and has shown no sign of surrendering.
Uthmeier put the practical limits in plain terms:
"I’m not ignorant of the fact that Raúl Castro is an older man who’s probably not looking to march himself into Miami."
He continued:
"I think others would get him before the court of law would, but at the end of the day, we stand ready to prosecute the case."
That readiness matters. For three decades, the families of the dead airmen watched Cuban officials treat the shootdown as a closed chapter. Florida’s charge does not guarantee a trial. It does put Castro’s name on a live state murder conspiracy case built on the same record federal prosecutors already took to a grand jury.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel rejected the new accusations at once. Díaz-Canel, who received power from Raúl Castro in 2018 and is described as a trusted loyalist, posted on X that the action had “no legal or practical basis whatsoever.”
Díaz-Canel wrote:
"This reprehensible action against the Army General, staged this morning in a pathetic Miami circus with an electoral subtext, has no legal or practical basis whatsoever, nor will it ever have one."
He added that the maneuver, “dressed up in legal terms by anti-Cuban politicians against Raúl and against Cuba,” deserved firm condemnation and was “part of an aggressive agenda” tied to the U.S. blockade and what he called collective punishment of the Cuban people.
That is the regime’s standard line. It does not answer the complaint’s account of unarmed civilian planes destroyed outside Cuban waters, or the four Americans who never came home.
Raúl Castro took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel in 2006, handed the presidency to Díaz-Canel in 2018, and retired as head of the Cuban Communist Party in 2021. He is still widely believed to wield power behind the scenes. The prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, has been cited as one sign of that continuing influence.
The Washington Examiner reported that Castro served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time of the shootdown, later led the country, and remained atop the Communist Party until 2021. Acting Attorney General Blanche stressed that senior Cuban regime leaders had finally been charged in the United States for violence that killed American citizens.
The timing sits inside a harder U.S. posture toward Havana. After U.S. forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, long a patron of the Cuban government, earlier this year, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba. The island has faced severe blackouts, food shortages, and economic collapse. President Trump has also threatened military action against Cuba since Maduro’s capture, and declared that America will not tolerate a rogue state harboring hostile foreign military, intelligence, and terror operations ninety miles from the U.S. homeland.
Florida’s new charge does not resolve custody. It does close another gap between federal murder counts and state law, and it keeps Castro’s name attached to the deaths of four Americans shot out of the sky nearly thirty years ago.
Dictators count on time, distance, and political excuses to erase their victims. Florida just refused to play along.
