President Trump should hold Cuba accountable for Brothers to the Rescue shootdown | Opinion

On a sunny Saturday afternoon 30 years ago — February 24, 1996 — four human-rights activists aboard two Cessna airplanes searching for rafters on the Florida Straits were shot down by Cuban warplanes.

Madeleine Albright, then secretary of state, presented irrefutable evidence to the international community of Cuba’s responsibility for this terrorist act.

After the murders, the White House promised that justice would be done. The Miami Herald reported several indictments, but the trial was never held because of prosecutorial discretion.

The victims — Mario de la Peña, 24; Carlos Costa and Pablo Morales, both 30, and Armando Alejandro Jr., 45, all of Miami-Dade — were members of the Cuban exile humanitarian organization Brothers to the Rescue. Their two small aircraft, flying over what were believed to be international waters, were pulverized by Cuban missiles. Their bodies were never recovered. Fidel and Raúl Castro were responsible for the crime.

Raúl Castro was then minister of the armed forces and in a June 21, 1996 recording has acknowledged he gave the order: “I said they should try to shoot them down.”

It was a premeditated act of state terrorism.

Fidel died in 2016, 10 years after relinquishing power to his brother. Raúl Castro had been acting president since 2006, formally becoming president on Feb. 24, 2008. He no longer is president, but a member of Cuba’s parliament.

No international law provides sovereign immunity to parliamentarians.

The statute of limitations does not apply to terrorist acts, yet, today, some lawmakers in the U.S. Congress support Cuba’s demand that it be removed from the State Department’s terrorist list.

In 2000, Cuban spymaster Gerardo Hernandez was sentenced to a double life sentence for espionage and murder conspiracy for the information he provided Havana that contributed to the shootdown. His sentence was commuted in December 2014, during President Obama’s thaw with Raúl Castro. Hernandez now is charged with overseeing surveillance activities over the entire Cuban populace and is rumored to be the successor to current Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Federal prosecutors in 2003 indicted Gen. Ruben Martinez Puente, the head of Cuba’s Air Force, and Lorenzo Alberto Perez-Perez and Francisco Perez-Perez, the two pilots involved in the shootdown. But the three have not been brought to justice, even after 20 years. Puente died on July 24, 2021, at 79.

The prior administration in 2023 allowed the entry to the U.S. of Luis Raúl González-Pardo, the Cuban Mig pilot who pursued a third Brothers to the Rescue plane that day in the Florida Straits. In 2025, he was charged with immigration fraud for making false statements pertaining to his prior membership in the Cuban Revolutionary Air and Air Defense Force from 1980 to 2009.

In the years since the shootdown, little has changed in U.S.-Cuban relations.

“The Cuban government has not demonstrated that it will refrain from the use of excessive force against United States vessels or aircraft that may engage in memorial activities or peaceful protest north of Cuba,” the Trump administration stated in a Feb. 20, 2025, notice on about the “continuation of the national emergency with respect to Cuba.”

Raúl Castro, like his subordinates who carried out his directive and were charged with this crime, should be charged. Failure to hold Cuban leaders accountable encourages Cuba to commit other egregious acts of state terror against Americans.

In February 2016, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (now secretary of state) said, “One of the most chilling things I have ever heard in my life is the audio recording of the regime pilots begging for orders to kill these men and then celebrating their takedown. The murder of these Americans was a gross violation of U.S. law for which justice has not been served.“

The president has a policy of America First in this hemisphere. Bringing accountability to Raul Castro and his henchman who carried out the murder of Americans sends a strong message to America’s enemies and will protect American lives.

Frank Calzon is former executive director of Center for a Free Cuba. John Suarez is executive director of Center for a Free Cuba.