By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on May 21, 2026
Raul Castro on May 1, 2018, foto: Bill Hackwell
In international politics, wars rarely begin with a single shot. They start with carefully measured leaks, alarmist headlines, intelligence reports, court documents, and narrative operations designed to transform a political adversary into an existential threat.
For weeks, outlets like Axios and Politico have been gradually shifting the narrative framing of Cuba based on direct leaks from the State Department. The island no longer appears solely as a country battered by economic crisis, the blockade, or energy shortages. It is now presented as a strategic threat, with alleged hostile intelligence capabilities, military cooperation, drones, and offensive potential against the United States.
Between an outburst by Donald Trump today and another by Marco Rubio the next day, a particularly sensitive new element has emerged: the opening of a legal case against Raúl Castro, the guerrilla symbol of the Cuban Revolution, who is now accused of shooting down, in 1996, two Cessna 337 light aircraft owned by Brothers to the Rescue. The Department of Justice, which included the names of five other Cubans alongside Raúl’s, is repeating the pattern already used against Nicolás Maduro.
The case of the light aircraft fits perfectly into a logic of gradual escalation of the conflict. The reactivation of legal charges against Raúl Castro is part of a political and media operation aimed at portraying Cuba as a threat and legitimizing new measures of pressure and exceptionalism.
However, the real story behind that episode is far more complex than the simplified and one-sided version promoted for decades by Washington. In the months leading up to February 24, 1996, Cuba repeatedly denounced the aerial incursions by Brothers to the Rescue to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the State Department, and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
The small planes had conducted 25 overflights of Havana to drop political propaganda and brazenly violate the airspace restrictions imposed by Cuban authorities, who had warned many times that they would no longer tolerate such actions. From Miami, José Basulto and other leaders of the group publicly announced new incursions and boasted of Cuba’s inability to stop them.
An internal FAA memo, sent on January 22, 1996, by official Cecilia Capestany to her superiors within the agency and now declassified by the National Security Archive in Washington, explicitly warned: “One of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of those planes.” The message showed that U.S. authorities were aware of the growing risk posed by Brothers to the Rescue’s aerial provocations long before the small planes were shot down.
The New Yorker, in January 1998, debunked much of the subsequent narrative, which portrayed Cuba as the culprit. The article revealed that high-ranking U.S. officials were fully aware of the risk of a confrontation, that explicit warnings had come from Havana, and that U.S. officials had even sent mixed signals regarding a possible halt to Brothers to the Rescue flights. They even went so far as to wonder what the Bill Clinton administration would have done if planes coming from Cuba had engaged, not once but many times, in violating Washington’s airspace.
Within the U.S. establishment itself, there was an awareness that Basulto—a Bay of Pigs mercenary and a long-time participant in paramilitary operations against Cuba—was acting in an increasingly provocative and uncontrolled manner. Officials, diplomats, and former military personnel warned that a serious incident was practically inevitable if the flights continued. Anyone, with the click of a mouse, can find the evidence.
However, following the downing of the light aircraft, the episode was quickly turned into a tool of domestic politics. Bill Clinton ended up signing the Helms-Burton Act, froze any attempt at détente with Cuba, and codified the blockade into U.S. law to prevent future presidents from dismantling or easing it through executive decisions.
At the same time, the ICAO investigation was mired in intense controversy. Cuba quickly handed over records, radar data, testimonies, and access to military and civilian facilities. The United States withheld key information, denied access to satellite imagery, and submitted incomplete or contradictory records.
Much of the public narrative ended up resting on indirect testimony and observations that were impossible to fully verify. Thirty years later, the case resurfaces amid a renewed climate of political hatred in Miami, with no attempt to conceal the true objective of the operation: to retrospectively construct a guilty party that would allow the 1996 episode to be linked to the current narrative of “Cuba as a strategic threat.”
What began as a media escalation is moving toward the worst failure of justice: legitimizing military aggression against Cuba.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English