Get That SOB, Mr. President

T his afternoon at Miami’s Freedom Tower, the Justice Department will announce the indictment of Raúl Castro for his role in the murder of four humanitarians over the Straits of Florida on February 24, 1996. The choice of setting is not incidental. The gateway through which the regime’s victims arrived in the 1960s is the gateway through which the regime now answers for them. The date is the anniversary of Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1902. The defendant is 94. He has earned an American cell for every hour that remains to him.

I was twelve when the MiGs went up. I remember it the way other kids remember the Challenger. Two Cessnas belonging to Brothers to the Rescue — unarmed civilian aircraft — were destroyed in international waters by Cuban MiGs. The men aboard were volunteers who flew the Florida Straits looking for Cuban rafters before the current finished them. Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales: three Americans and a legal resident, one a Marine and Vietnam veteran of 45, the others in their twenties. Judge James Lawrence King, finding the Cuban regime civilly liable the following year, recorded that the destruction “was so complete that the four bodies were never recovered.”

My parents took me downtown to march. The streets filled — women in black, men carrying placards bearing four faces, grandmothers who had buried husbands in 1959 weeping now for grandsons they had never met. I had never seen grown men cry like that. To have fled one country in the trust that a second would protect one’s children, and to learn on a February afternoon that the first could reach across 90 miles of sea to pull those children down into it, is a grief peculiar to the exile. It is also instructive. 

The case has lain on the desks of administrations of both parties for 30 years. In February, four members of Congress — Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Giménez of Florida, joined by Nicole Malliotakis of New York — sent a letter to President Trump asking the Department to take it up. The evidence is clear.

In 1996, Raúl Castro was Cuba’s minister of defense and commander of the armed forces. Three weeks after the killings, Fidel Castro brazenly told Time: “We discussed it with Raul. We gave the order to the head of the air force. They shot the planes down.” Audio later obtained by the Miami Herald captured Raul himself: “I told them to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory,” and, “Knock them down into the sea when they reappear.” Judge King found in 1997 that the operation had been planned in advance. The International Civil Aviation Organization confirmed it occurred in international airspace.

It was an execution carried out in mid-air.

The case enters court today in hands familiar with the four names. Some of the prosecutors, including U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, are themselves the children of exiles. They learned those names at their kitchen tables.

The same community formed the man who runs the State Department. Marco Rubio came of age among the exiles of Castro’s revolution and began his career on the West Miami City Commission. He has spent the years since making the case others in Washington would not — that the regime 90 miles from Key West is a criminal enterprise — and he now leads the hemispheric policy that is bringing it to its knees. Coincidence is too thin a word for it.

The pilots who fired the missiles, and the general who commanded them, remain in Cuba, decorated. Only one man has ever been delivered to American justice for the killings: Gerardo Hernández, a Cuban intelligence officer convicted in 2001 for furnishing Havana the flight plans. He served 17 years of two life terms before President Obama traded him back to Havana in 2014. He was received there as a hero. Raúl, until this afternoon, has walked free.

For the families of the four, the wait has been particular. Mothers who outlived their sons. Fathers who became their lobbyists. Siblings who became their public voice. They testified in Washington and at the OAS, sat through every appeal in Miami courtrooms, and pressed for justice from past administrations that filed the case under “too complicated.” Some have died waiting. The ones who remain will be at Biscayne Boulevard today.

Many in the wider community waited their whole lives, too. My grandparents did not live to see it. Neither did my father, a veteran of Brigade 2506 who served in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. They belonged to the generation that built Miami on one suitcase and a single premise, longer than a lifetime: that the country which received them would, in due course, render the account they could not.

Today’s act is also owed to those who carried the larger cause as far as life would let them. Men like Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Mario’s elder brother, who demanded Fidel’s indictment on the House floor in 1999 and kept pressing for 26 years until his final breath last year. Jorge Mas Canosa, who built the political conscience of the diaspora, died in 1997. Oswaldo Payá, whose Varela Project dared to ask, from inside that imprisoned island, for free elections, was killed by the regime in a staged car crash in 2012. Carlos Alberto Montaner, the most penetrating chronicler of Castro’s Cuba, died in 2023. None of them lived to see this hour. Yet each knew that this indictment speaks for far more: the firing squads, the political prisoners, the thousands who sleep at the bottom of the Straits, 3 million driven into exile, an island once the wealthiest in the Caribbean now a starving nation.

I will be at the Freedom Tower today, in the building that once gave my family refuge. For my grandparents. For my father. And for my infant daughter, that one day she may know the island of her ancestors because the same people who lost their country kept their dignity, kept their hope, and never lost their faith.

Scripture knows this rhythm. Moses dies on the far side of the Jordan, in sight of a Promised Land he will not enter. The work passes to Joshua. “Moses my servant is dead,” the Lord tells him. “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan.” Crossings are completed by those who did not begin them; promises are kept by those who did not first hear them spoken.

Edmund Burke understood the same arrangement in civil terms. Society, he wrote in the Reflections, is a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Justice owed to the dead binds the living. To have let the man who ordered the killing of Alejandre, Costa, de la Peña, and Morales slip out of this world unindicted would have broken that sacred partnership.

When historians write the chapter on the Cuban Revolution, they will find, in the matter of four humanitarians shot out of the sky, the indictment of the man who ordered it. Whether Raúl Castro lives long enough to face a jury is for time and God to settle. Delta Force is welcome to lend Him a hand.

Get that SOB, Mr. President.