The Communist Party of Cuba organized a massive military display shortly after dawn on Friday before the U.S. embassy in Havana to condemn the U.S. government for indicting dictator Raúl Castro on murder charges.
The event featured several high-profile members of the Party, including various Politburo bigwigs and, most prominently, figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel. Notably absent from the affair was Díaz-Canel’s boss, Castro himself, who is approaching his 95th birthday next month. In response to the indictment against him, the Party has also announced a wave of nationwide events to honor Castro’s 95th birthday, perpetuating the personality cult once controlled by older brother Fidel.
On Wednesday — Cuban Independence Day — the Department of Justice announced that it had indicted Raúl Castro and several other Communist Party underlings on a variety of criminal charges, including murder and conspiracy to kill American nationals, for his role in the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue killings. In February of that year, the Cuban military shot down airplanes belonging to the humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue over international waters as they were searching for wayward Cuban refugees attempting to cross the Florida Straits to America. Americans Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales were killed as the planes were shot down into the Caribbean Sea. Audio exists appearing to document Raúl Castro boasting of the killings.
“For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens,” Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said following the announcement of the indictment on Wednesday. “President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”
Prior to the Brothers to the Rescue murders, for decades and even before Fidel Castro’s 1959 coup d’etat, younger brother Raúl developed a reputation for bloodthirstiness on par with Ernesto “Che” Guevara who openly boasted of his mass murders before the United Nations General Assembly. Raúl Castro was often in charge of firing squads to kill suspected anti-communist dissidents, doing the “dirty work” Fidel did not want to handle.
The Communist Party has responded with outrage and panic at the indictment, given the precedent of the indictment and arrest of one of Castro’s closest allies, former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Maduro was arrested by American forces in Caracas, Venezuela, on January 3. He was protected by Cuban state security agents, 32 of which perished defending the foreign leader.
The event on Friday, organized in front of the American embassy, was meant to intimidate the United States, presumably into dropping the charges, and to show unity as a new campaign called “SOS Trump” has emerged in Cuba, pleading for American intervention to end 67 years of communist rule.
The independent outlet Cubanet reported that the regime brought busloads of loyalists into the center of Havana for the event, calling into question the regime’s claims that it has run out of fuel as a result of Maduro’s arrest. Venezuela was once a critical source of free or steeply discounted oil for Cuba but has stopped its shipments following the removal of Maduro.
Díaz-Canel posted video of the event at dawn, attending in military garb and shaking hands with regime loyalists on the front lines of the mandatory event. Social media posts featuring the images are attempting to popularize the hashtag “#RaulIsRaul,” apparently used with positive connotation. The Communist Party newspaper Granma claimed that “thousands” of people attended the event.
Granma described the menacing mob before the embassy as an act of “patriotic reaffirmation and denunciation before imperial assaults.” The Cuban regime regularly refuses to refer to America by its proper name, instead disparagingly calling the country “the empire.” It reported that, while Castro did not personally attend, a statement from the dictator was read at the rally by Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, a former Cuban spy who now runs the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the Communist Party’s internal spy network. Hernández was the only person to be arrested and legally processed for his involvement in the Brothers to the Rescue killings before former President Barack Obama freed him to receive a hero’s welcome in Havana.
Hernández appeared to justify the killing of Americans in his remarks, as published by Granma, claiming that Cuba “suffered more than 25 grave violations of its airspace between 1994 and 1996,” without offering any proof of these alleged violations.
“Against how high morale they are always inciting all sorts of plans, always allied with lies, with terrorism,” Hernández claimed. In reality, Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, allied with organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Contrary to other Cuban officials, who have called the killings a hoax, Hernández justified them as an “act of legitimate defense.”
Killing the men, he added, “is an inalienable right of any nation and watching for the security of its citizens is an obligation.”
Another speaker at the event, a “young jurist” named Rolando López Meriño, falsely claimed that the United States could not indict Castro for killing its citizens for unspecified jurisdictional reasons.
“The United States cannot exert its jurisdiction in a matter that occurred outside of the territory of its state and against Cuban nationals” he claimed. In addition to the incorrect understanding of jurisdiction, López reiterated the Communist Party’s position that American citizens are Cuban citizens if they are ethnically Cuban, even if they were born in the United States and have never set foot on the island.
The Communist Party reacted with belligerent and violent statements to Castro’s indictment this week. Díaz-Canel led the effort, predicting a “bloodbath” in the event that America acted to enforce the indictment.
“If they [arrest plans] are to materialize,” he wrote on social media, “they will provoke a bloodbath of incalculable consequences, plus the destructive impact on peace and regional stability.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the indictment on Thursday, recalling that Castro “openly admits and brags [that]… he gave the order to shoot down civilian airplanes.”
“I’m not going to talk about how we’re gong to get him here, if we were trying to get him here,” he added, when asked by reporters. “Why would I say to the media what our plans are about that?”
Rubio noted that Castro would “become a fugitive of American justice” if he avoided the legal proceedings.