Get That SOB, Mr. President: The Case Against Raúl Castro

This 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.”

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Giancarlo Sopo

Giancarlo Sopo is a writer exploring cinema, politics, and the conservative imagination.

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This 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.”