Earlier this month, after months of strangling life in Cuba by blockading fuel supplies, the Trump administration moved to indict the 94-year-old former President Raul Castro Ruz over the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits. Mr. Castro was then the Defence Minister of Cuba. The then President and Raul’s brother, Fidel Castro, had publicly taken responsibility for the attack, which killed four, in what Havana said was its own airspace.
While sections of the U.S. media invariably describe the shootdown of the ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ — the group that flew the aircraft towards Cuba — as an unprovoked murder, records show the group indulged in significant provocation. Its founder, Jose Basulto, a Cuban emigre and veteran of the failed, covert U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, told The Atlantic he had been “trained as a terrorist” by the U.S. The ‘Brothers’ had repeatedly flown into Cuban airspace to drop anti-government leaflets, seeking what Basulto described as “confrontation”. Cuba had warned the U.S. authorities; on the day of the shootdown, Cuban air controllers warned the pilots off, and Basulto replied: “We are ready to do it. It is our right as free Cubans.”
The immediate outcome was a tightening of the U.S. embargo — in place since 1962 and what Havana has always termed an economic blockade — most notably through the Helms-Burton Act passed barely three weeks after the shootdown. But it is for this 30-year-old incident that Raul Castro is being charged, in a replay of the farcical accusations that led to the U.S.’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro early this year.
Why has a frail 94-year-old, by many accounts weak of hearing and slow of speech, found himself in the crosshairs of a Trump administration once again? It is worth knowing the biography of a remarkable revolutionary long overshadowed by his charismatic elder brother, Fidel.
Raul Castro was born in Biran, eastern Cuba, in 1931 — the youngest of three brothers, whose landowning father sent them to school together. Fidel, in My Life, tells the journalist Ignacio Ramonet that he practically raised Raul during their school years. But Raul’s politics were his own. As a law student at Havana University, he joined the youth wing of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) — Cuba’s main communist party at the time — and travelled to a Soviet-organised youth congress in Vienna in 1953.
‘Rank-and-file combatant’
When Fidel, along with other Orthodox Party (left nationalists) members, laid out the plan to attack the Moncada barracks as a first step to overthrow the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, Raul signed on — a step that put him at odds with the PSP, which had condemned what proved a failed assault. Raul went in as a “rank-and-file combatant” (in Fidel’s words). When the assault collapsed, and his unit was cornered, Raul managed to turn the surrounding soldiers themselves into his prisoners, saving his men from torture and execution. He was eventually caught and imprisoned with Fidel on the Isle of Pines. On release, the brothers left for Mexico, where Raul first met the Argentine doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, whom he introduced to Fidel.
Along with Che and an 80-strong rebel force, Fidel boarded the yacht Granma to launch a guerrilla-style insurrection in December 1956, only to be attacked by Batista’s troops three days after landing and reduced to a handful of survivors. Two weeks later, Raul caught up with his brother’s group in the Sierra Maestra, carrying five rifles to add to Fidel’s two — prompting Fidel’s famous declaration, “Now we can win this war”.
Out of that nucleus, the rebels slowly built columns and bases across eastern Cuba. By March 1958, Raul was given his own command — the Second Eastern Front ‘Frank Pais’, in the mountains north of Santiago. At just 26, he ran not only a military front but a rudimentary state apparatus. When his front came under aerial attack, he retaliated by kidnapping U.S. citizens working in the area — drawing international attention and forcing a halt to the air raids. Fidel would later call Raul’s Second Front “strategic” to the war’s outcome.
When the Revolution triumphed in January 1959, Raul became Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, a post he would hold for 49 years in what became the communist government in Cuba. He is credited with building a state from a guerrilla army — purging the Batista officer corps, raising the National Revolutionary Militias and building Cuba’s defence forces. He helped lead the defence at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and was sent to Moscow during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis with a hand-written military agreement that was accepted by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Raul oversaw what became Cuba’s largest overseas deployment — internationalist forces to Angola in support of the MPLA government of Agostinho Neto against South African intervention. The 15-year engagement ultimately forced Pretoria to the negotiating table and helped accelerate the end of apartheid in southern Africa — a contribution acknowledged by none other than Nelson Mandela.
If the 1980s were a test of Raul’s military thinking, the 1990s challenged his organisational skills on a far larger scale. Following the collapse of Cuba’s main economic benefactor, the USSR, he played a key role in addressing the resulting crisis. He turned the FAR into an economic institution, declaring that “beans are worth more than cannons”, and put it to work in agriculture. Out of these reforms grew the military’s commercial conglomerate Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), which over the last two decades has become a behemoth controlling vast tracts of the Cuban economy. Critics charge it has grown without sufficient accountability while Cuba’s sympathisers credit it with holding the country together through the long siege of the U.S. embargo.
Short-lived thaw
Today, GAESA has been explicitly targeted by the Trump administration — yet another turn in U.S.-Cuba relations, which had briefly thawed before Mr. Trump first came to power.
That thaw came under Raul’s presidency, which began formally in 2008 after he had already taken the reins in 2006 when Fidel fell ill. Even earlier, as Defence Minister, Raul had quietly opened back channels to the U.S. through anti-narcotics and anti-migration cooperation. As President, a role he continued after Fidel’s death, he legalised private enterprise, took down the controversial dual currency system, and kept his promise to step down after two terms.
Under President Barack Obama’s second term, Raul worked towards the thaw leading to the announcement of December 17, 2014, when the two leaders simultaneously declared the restoration of full diplomatic ties after more than five decades of estrangement. The embargo remained in place, but restrictions on travel and remittances were eased. The opening proved short-lived. Under the first Trump administration, much of it was rolled back, the embargo tightened, and Cuba redesignated a “state sponsor of terrorism”, despite being a victim of terror acts committed with overt and covert U.S. help.
Today, with the January 2026 executive order branding Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security, the fuel blockade choking daily life, the Pentagon reportedly drafting plans for military action, and now an indictment against Raul, all indications point to a naked attempt to bring down by force a state that the U.S. has long sought to upend through other means.
Cubans have marked the indictment with rallies in Havana in solidarity with their veteran revolutionary leader, who, despite being long dismissed by detractors as merely Fidel’s brother, remains a deputy of the National Assembly and a defining figure of the Cuban state following the 1959 Revolution.
Published – May 24, 2026 01:08 am IST
