Cuban American Members of Congress Ask Trump to Indict Raul Castro

There’s a bit of Cuba news to catch up on today. First of all, four Cuban-American members of congress have sent President Trump a letter requesting that he indict Raul Casrto. Castro is no longer the ruler of Cuba but at 94-years-old he’s still the link to his deceased brother Fidel and the history of the Cuban revolution. The premise of the letter is that Raul Castro was in charge of the island’s military back in 1996 when Cuba shot down a plane carrying members of an aid group. Here’s a bit of what the letter says.

It is our understanding, based on public information, that on February 24, 1996,RaulCastro ordered a Cuban Mig fighter jet to engage and obliterate two Brothers to the Rescue civilian aircraft over international waters. Flying those planes were three American citizens, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Pena and Pablo Morales, a legal U.S. resident. Those four brave men were flying small civilian aircraft over the Straits of Florida to identify and help rescue Cuban rafters making the perilous escape from totalitarian Cuba. We believe that the following facts are instructive regarding Raul Castro’s complicity in the crime:

• Raul Castro Ruz is the brother of the late tyrant Fidel Castro and the former Director of the Cuban Secret Services, Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Air Force, President of the Ministry of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and Deputy Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party.
• In an audio recording of a conversation which took place just weeks after the shooting and obtained by The Miami Herald, Raul Castro can be heard discussing giving the orders to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft: In the recording, Raul Castro can be heard saying: “I told them [Cuban Mig pilots] to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, ”and “Knock them down into the sea when they reappear.”…
• On August 21, 2003,a U.S. grand jury indicted the two Cuban fighter pilots, Lorenzo Alberto Perez-Perez and Francisco Perez-Perez, and their commanding general, Ruben Martinez Puente, then head of the Cuban Air Force, on murder charges for the 1996shootdownordered by Raul Castro. They were charged with four counts of murder, one count of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals and two counts of destruction of aircraft…

We believe unequivocally that Raul Castro is responsible for this heinous crime; it is time for him to be brought to justice.

The letter was signed by Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar and Nicole Malliotakis. Here’s what Axios is saying about the letter:

If Trump’s Justice Department acts on the request and secures an indictment, it would be the latest move by his administration aimed at pressuring Cuba’s struggling government to change its communist leadership.

Crippling U.S. sanctions and government mismanagement have brought Cuba closer to collapse than ever since the revolution of 1959.

Feb. 24 marks the 30th anniversary of the incident, which prompted the enshrining of the U.S. embargo of Cuba into federal law.

What does this mean? Well, Trump has repeatedly said that he thinks Cuba is on the verge of collapse and the he wants the country to make a deal. A deal in this case means opening up the country in exchange for an end to sanctions. Cuba has so far been resisting though they are quickly running out of oil. An indictment of Raul Castro could lead to the kind of operation we saw in Venezuela last month where an indictment of Nikolas Maduro led to him being picked up by US special forces and taken to a jail in the U.S. to face trial. If the same were to happen to Castro, that might put a symbolic end to the country’s communist history and make it easier for someone to step up and, as Trump says, make a deal.

Meanwhile, more signs that the oil embargo is having an impact. Bloomberg looked at satellite photos of Cuba at night and found that the amount of light present at night (corresponding to electricity) is down in most of the country.

Its grid was fragile even before a critical transmission line failure in early December temporarily severed the link between Havana and the Caribbean country’s primary thermoelectric power plants in Matanzas. Then the Trump administration blocked fuel shipments that supply 60% of the roughly 100,000 barrels of crude a day it needs to feed its aging power system.

Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.

The one exception is Havana where the amount of light is basically unchanged. That could be because the government wants to keep the lights on in Havana or it could partly be because people in Havana have adopted solar panels to deal with constant outages. Whatever the case, most of the country is slipping into darkness. And right on cue, Barron’s is reporting there is a refinery fire.

A fire broke out Friday at a refinery in Cuba’s capital, threatening to compound the island nation’s struggles as it faces what amounts to a US oil blockade.

AFP observed a massive column of smoke rising from the Nico Lopez refinery in Havana Bay, though it was not known if the blaze was near the plant’s oil storage tanks.

Lastly, the UN is condemning the US for the oil embargo.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk on Friday urged the lifting of U.S. sanctions that impede oil deliveries to Cuba, criticizing the widespread disruption they cause the Caribbean nation as a rights violation.

Cuba’s loss of oil imports since the U.S. took control of the oil industry in Venezuela, its biggest supplier, has crippled an already struggling economy that depends heavily on oil to generate the electricity that powers the island.

“We are extremely worried about Cuba’s deepening socio-economic crisis — amid a decades-long financial and trade embargo, extreme weather events, and the recent U.S. measures restricting oil shipments,” Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for Mr. Türk’s office in Geneva told reporters.

Hopefully the Trump administration will ignore that. Cuba can change the situation at any moment, it just has to let go of the past and embrace a better future.

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