True Lies Across the Water

By Stephen Kimber on May 23, 2026

The real story behind the so-called murder charge against former Cuban President Raúl Castro

On Wednesday, May 20, 2026, before a cheering crowd of Cuban exile luminaries in Miami’s Freedom Tower, acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the “historic” indictment of 94-year-old former Cuban president Raúl Castro on charges of ordering the murders of four American nationals 30 years ago.

The charges relate to a 1996 incident in which Castro, then the defence minister, allegedly ordered Cuban MiGs to shoot down unarmed civilian aircraft operated by the Miami-based “humanitarian” organization, Brothers to the Rescue, in the Straits of Florida.

Like the press conference itself, the unsealed 26-page grand jury indictment was long on rhetoric but short on context.

Context? Where to begin?

One could easily start with the 67-year-and-counting campaigns by various US administrations to overthrow the Cuban government through assassinations, invasions, and support for countless exile plots to blow up passenger-carrying aircraft, bomb tourist hotels, and wreak other assorted acts of calculated mayhem.

But let’s begin closer to the scene, and time, of “the crime.”

While researching What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, I spent a good deal of time investigating the backstory to the shootdown of those planes. Gerardo Hernandez, one of the Five, was ultimately charged, convicted and sentenced to a double-life-plus fifteen-year sentence for what turned out to be his lack of any direct involvement in the decision to shoot down those planes.

What follows is based on that research. The excerpts are from the book.

On November 10, 1994, on what seemed at the time like a whim, a frustrated José Basulto, the founder of Brothers to the Rescue, changed course on a flight from the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, back to Miami.

“Basulto suddenly had an idea. Instead of flying north, he banked the plane to the left and headed—illegally—into Cuban airspace. Why not? It was there.”

Basulto’s frustration was understandable. A Bay of Pigs veteran who’d been personally involved in armed attacks against Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, Basulto had seemingly found a new role for himself by the early 1990s. He and pilots from Brothers to the Rescue, the organization he founded, flew highly publicized patrols over the Straits of Florida, spotting and helping to rescue hundreds of Cubans trying to make their way to Florida and their promised special path to US citizenship in rickety rafts The publicity was good for Brothers’ reputation, and that reputation was good for fundraising. Until…

On September 9, 1994, the Clinton administration announced it had struck a deal with the Cubans. The United States would no longer automatically allow Cubans picked up in the Straits to come to America—a reversal of its decades-old policy. Instead, rafters intercepted at sea would be dispatched to “safe haven” camps in Panama or Guantanamo.…. In future, to accommodate ordinary Cubans who did want to immigrate, the U.S. agreed to legally admit no fewer than 20,000 of them each year, but through normal channels. In exchange, Cuba promised to use “persuasive methods” to discourage its citizens from trying to make their way by sea.

The new U.S.-Cuba agreement, of course, had also had an unintended consequence for Brothers to the Rescue. Suddenly, it had no one to rescue. Once the rafters realized they would be shipped off to Guantanamo or Panama if Brothers’ pilots notified the Coast Guard of their coordinates, they began angrily waving off their would-be saviours the moment they spotted one of their aircraft overhead. And with no one to rescue—and no publicity for having done it—donations had also begun to dry up…. In 1993, at the height of the rafters’ crisis, Brothers to the Rescue had raised nearly a million dollars in public contributions. After the 1994 agreement, it took in less than a third of that. Basulto, who’d long since given up his house-building day job, had been forced to drop his own $60,000 annual salary down to $37,000…. Basulto had tried to stir up new interest by pitching fund-raising drives, telethons and collections to support the dissident movement inside Cuba, but those pleas had fallen flat.

Basulto needed a new pitch. He found it becoming a provocateur, deliberately and illegally flying into Cuban airspace. On July 13, 1995, nine months after his first incursion, he and a fellow pilot flew over Cuba’s capital, Havana, “raining thousands of religious medallions and ‘Not Comrades, Brothers’ bumper stickers on the streets below.”

(Imagine, for just a moment, that these were Cuban airplanes, flying illegally over the skies of Washington. How would US officials have responded? But I digress….)

Though Basulto claimed the decision to fly over Havana that day was spontaneous, it wasn’t. The Criminal Intelligence Bureau of the Miami-Dade police department had already concluded, in a report written a week before the incident, that “recent information received from various sources has revealed the intention of several organizers to create an international incident.”

The US Federal Aviation Administration was so concerned that it met with Basulto before the July incident to warn him not to fly into Cuban airspace. “Chuck,” Basulto told the FAA’s Charles Smith, “you know I always play by the rules, but you must understand I have a mission in life to perform.”

In August, a month after his July 13 Havana flyover, the FAA wrote to Basulto to inform him it intended to suspend his pilot’s license for 120 days as a result of his actions. Basulto professed unconcern. “It’s a bunch of pages,” he said of the FAA letter. “I won’t read it until after [an upcoming flotilla], and I will talk to my lawyer, but I won’t do anything with this until next week.”

He had good reason not to worry. Basulto had 15 days to appeal the FAA decision. Even if that ruling was upheld, Basulto could appeal again to the National Transportation Safety Board. That could take another year. Until then…

In August 1995, ahead of plans for a planned September 2 protest…

The State Department issued a “Public Announcement,” warning about possible “arrest or other enforcement action by Cuban authorities” for anyone illegally entering Cuban waters or airspace. “The Cuban government asserted its ‘firm determination’ to take action necessary to defend Cuban territorial sovereignty and to prevent unauthorized incursions into Cuban territorial waters and airspace… [The Cuban government] warns that any boat from abroad can be sunk and any airplane downed.’ The Department takes this statement seriously.”

On October 11, 1995, the US sent a diplomatic note to the Cubans in response to Cuba’s official protests of Basulto’s earlier incursions into its territory. It said:

“The FAA is charging Jose Basulto, a leader of the Brothers to the Rescue, with violating federal aviation regulations FAR 91.703, operating a U.S. registered aircraft within a foreign country in noncompliance with the regulations of that country, and FAR 91.13, operating an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.”

But then, three months later, in January 1996, following yet another incursion into Cuban airspace in which thousands of anti-Cuban leaflets were sent down from the skies over Havana, Basulto took credit without taking credit.

José Basulto was clearly enjoying himself. “Let’s just say we take responsibility for those leaflets,” he told a reporter from the Miami Herald after reports that thousands of pamphlets urging Cubans to rise up against Fidel Castro had mysteriously dropped from the sky onto the streets of Havana two days before. “But I cannot give you any of the technical details of how we did it,” he added. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Later that day, a Radio Marti interviewer asked him why he thought Cuba’s military hadn’t retaliated against this latest incursion, the second in four days. Basulto’s reply seemed as much a challenge to any Cubans who might be listening as a direct answer to the question. “That is the same question that our compatriots on the Island should ask when they fear the Cuban Government,” he said. “We have been willing to take personal risks for this. They should be willing to do the same. They should see that this regime isn’t invulnerable, that Castro isn’t impenetrable, that many things are within our reach to be done.”

What about the American government, the interviewer asked? What did he think about its lack of response to his… er, this latest overflight?

Basulto’s reply was dismissive. “The United States,” he said, “is on vacation.”

Finally. Something Basulto and the Cuban government agreed on.

The Cubans’ frustration and concern grew. They had good reason for concern, beyond the dropping of a few pamphlets from the sky. It’s worth noting that, during the trial of the Cuban Five in 2000—including for their alleged involvement in the shootdown—one of the Five’s lawyers …

…forced Basulto to admit that Brothers had been test-firing potential weapons that could have been used against Cuba and introduced [a] letter Basulto had received from a man peddling used Czech military jets.

Basulto, it seemed, had more ambitious, dangerous plans than just leafletting.

In public and in private meetings, the Cubans warned the Americans that if they didn’t rein in Basulto, Cuba would. During a January 19, 1996, meeting between Fidel Castro and Bill Richardson, the US ambassador to the United Nations, for example, Richardson later reported that Castro “warned me about these overflights, and he wanted us to do something about them.”

In early February, during a visit to Havana by a delegation of retired US military and foreign service officers, Cuban officials repeatedly raised the issue of the incursions and specifically asked, “What would be the reaction of your military if we shot one of those planes down? We can, you know.”

When [Retired US Admiral Eugene Carroll] and his group returned to Washington, they arranged to meet with officials from both the State Department and the Defence Intelligence Agency to brief them on their trip, but especially the Cuban warning “we thought was intended for us to carry back to Washington.”

Carroll delivered the message.

On January 22, 1996, a manager in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of International Aviation sent an email to half a dozen FAA and other officials who were tasked with responding to the ongoing illegal intrusions into Cuban airspace by Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.

“In light of last week’s intrusion, this latest [planned] overflight can only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government,” she wrote. “[The State Department] is increasingly concerned about Cuban reactions to these flagrant violations. They are also asking from the FAA, ‘What is this agency doing to prevent/deter these actions?’

“Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes, and the FAA better have all its ducks in a row.”

On February 16—just eight days before the shootdown—US officials sent yet another diplomatic note to Cuba seeking additional information about the first Basulto violation, which had happened seven months earlier.

“The FAA was still gathering information—and only about this earlier flight! When would its investigators get around to looking into last month’s incursion? Or next month’s?”

At 2:40 pm on February 23, 1996, one day before the shootdown, the FAA manager liaising with the State Department on what to do about Basulto’s latest announced plan—“a humanitarian mission over the Straits of Florida on Saturday to mark the 101^st anniversary of ‘the rallying cry of José Marti that began the War of Independence”— sent an “urgent” email:

It “would not be unlikely,” she wrote, for Brothers to the Rescue to make another “unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace tomorrow,” and it would be even less likely for the Cuban government “to show restraint in an unauthorized flight scenario this time around. I have reiterated to State that the FAA cannot PREVENT flights such as this potential one, but that we will alert our folks in case it happens, and we will document it as best we can for compliance/enforcement purposes.”

Over at the White House, Richard Nuccio, the administration’s point man on Cuba, had asked the FAA to issue another specific warning to Basulto about just how dangerous it might be for him to taunt the Cubans yet again. But a senior FAA official, [he later said], “rebuffed our concerns and said if they happen to run into him, they would mention it, but they would not make a special effort, that [Basulto] was already quite annoyed and they didn’t want to bother him further.”

That night, Nuccio emailed Sandy Berger, Clinton’s Deputy National Security Advisor, to warn him that this latest planned incursion “may finally trip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the planes.”

The next day, that is exactly what happened.

So, context….

Cuba’s decision to shoot down Brothers to the Rescue planes illegally and repeatedly violating its sovereign airspace followed fifteen months of unrelenting diplomatic efforts to convince the United States government to take responsibility for stopping what the United States Federal Aviation Authority itself admitted was Basulto’s “noncompliance with the regulations of that country, and FAR 91.13, operating an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.”

What made these provocative incursions all the more threatening was that the Cuban government already knew—through its agents on the ground—that Basulto was not only test-firing weapons that could be used to attack Cuba from the air but that he was also in correspondence with an arms dealer selling used Czech military jets.

The Cubans complained through diplomatic channels. The Cubans complained through private back channels. The Cubans warned repeatedly that they could and would take action if the US didn’t.

The US didn’t. The Cubans did.

And now, thirty years later, the Trump administration has charged Raúl Castro, Cuba’s defence minister at the time, with murder.

Compare Cuba’s actions then with Donald Trump’s current ongoing, no-warnings aerial bombing of close to sixty small vessels suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The US has, so far, killed more than 190 civilians without charge or trial.

So, who should be facing murder charges?

The excerpts in this article are quoted from the 2013 book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, available in paperback from the publisher, Fernwood Publishing or as an ebook from the author

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano