By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-10-19 16:15:41 | Updated at 2026-10-19 21:06:37
9 hours ago
Florida just put a target on the back of Cuba’s most notorious living dictator.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that state prosecutors and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement have secured an arrest warrant for Raúl Castro, the 95-year-old brother of Fidel. The warrant charges him with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the 1996 downing of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes over international waters.
The judge ordered no bond.
“Raul Castro ordered the murder of four Floridians in cold blood, and Florida will never stop pursuing accountability for that communist conspiracy,” Uthmeier said.
“Thirty years later, we are still fighting for justice,” Uthmeier added.
The four men killed were Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Mario de la Peña, and Armando Alejandre Jr.
According to the affidavit, Castro, then Cuba’s armed forces minister and first vice president, was a final decision-maker in the chain of command that green-lit the attack. Prosecutors say he gave his generals a standing order to shoot the planes down at sea when they showed up, and told those with the authority not to consult anyone first.
The plot allegedly reached right into South Florida. Cuban spies in the so-called Wasp Network, operating in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, passed along flight plans and supported a Havana scheme dubbed “Operation Scorpion,” the affidavit says.
On February 24, 1996, three unarmed Cessnas took off from Miami Opa-Locka Executive Airport. After they crossed the 24th parallel, well outside Cuban waters, Cuban MiGs blew two of them out of the sky with air-to-air missiles. All four men aboard were killed.
Both planes were flying away from Cuba, and neither got a warning, even though they were in contact with Havana air traffic control, prosecutors say.
Because the spying took place in both Miami-Dade and Monroe, the Office of Statewide Prosecution will handle the case as a multi-circuit organized criminal conspiracy. Officials say more charges are possible. The warrant was signed by Chief Judge Ariana Fajardo Orshan of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit.
The state charge comes on top of a federal indictment. Earlier this year, the U.S. Justice Department charged Castro in Miami over the same shootdown, with Uthmeier at the podium alongside federal officials. Washington has said it wants to drag Castro into court, sparking speculation about an operation like the January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
Castro is the last man standing from the 1959 revolution, and his record goes back a long way.
He fought alongside Fidel in the botched 1953 Moncada Barracks attack, sailed back to Cuba on the yacht Granma in 1956, and led a rebel front in the Sierra Maestra.
Once the rebels seized power, Raúl ran summary trials and firing squads in Oriente province. He is blamed for the January 1959 massacre at San Juan Hill in Santiago, where more than 70 people were tried and shot.
A photo from the guerrilla war, published in the Havana magazine Carteles in 1959, shows Raúl Castro blindfolding a man moments before he was executed by firing squad in Oriente province.
In March 2016, then-President Barack Obama did “the wave” with Castro at a Havana baseball game just hours after terrorists bombed Brussels.
Castro ran Cuba’s military from 1959 to 2008, building the web of party, army, and secret police that still runs the island. He took over from Fidel in 2006, handed the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018, and quit as Communist Party boss in 2021. However, insiders say he still pulls the strings.
Nobody knows exactly how many Cubans died under the Castro brothers. Cuba Archive has documented about 5,700 firing-squad executions, plus roughly 1,200 extrajudicial killings and 1,200 deaths in prison. Estimates of rafters who died fleeing the island run from under 20,000 to more than 77,000. Political scientist R.J. Rummel put the total at between 35,000 and 141,000 for 1959 to 1987 alone.
Castro’s health has been failing. He skipped the July 26 revolution ceremony for the first time in decades, and reports surfaced in September that he had suffered a stroke. Cuban officials said nothing, and he later appeared at a military event looking visibly frail.
For the families of the four men murdered over the Florida Straits, the clock is ticking.
