How Raul Castro Helped Communist Cuba Resist the US
The U.S. federal indictment for Raúl Castro over decades-old accusations shows the long game Washington has played in targeting Cuba’s former president, who along with his late brother Fidel, has been a thorn in the side of successive American administrations.
“If Fidel was the father of the nation, Raúl is the uncle,” Helen Yaffe, co-host of the Cuba Analysis podcast told Newsweek on Thursday.
The U.S. Justice Department announced Wednesday criminal charges against Raúl Castro, 94, over accusations he ordered the downing of two civilian aircraft from the Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue in 1996. Three Americans were among the four people killed in the attack by two Cuban MiG fighters in international airspace. Havana has called the charges an escalation by a Trump administration intent on regime change, insisting they distort historical events.
Indictment Is Latest U.S. Move To Pressure Castro
Castro and his elder brother were born in Birán, eastern Cuba. Fidel became the political and ideological face of the revolutionary movement, while Raúl played a more military and organizational role.
Both took part in the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks during an attempted uprising against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, after which they were arrested and exiled in Mexico.
In 1956, they returned Cuba aboard the boat Granma and over the next two years built popular support through a guerrilla war, entering Havana on January 1, 1959, after the collapse of Batista's army.
Castro served as minister of the Cuban military during his brother's tenure as president. He took over as head of state in 2006 when his brother’s health deteriorated, serving until 2018, before handing over power to Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Despite stepping down as president and resigning as secretary of Cuba's communist party in 2019, Castro remains one of the most powerful figures in Cuban politics.
“He still has a lot of moral and political authority,” said Yaffe, who is professor of Latin American Political Economy at Glasgow University in Scotland.
She said it was significant that in January, Raúl had marched alongside Díaz-Canel during protests against the stepping up of the U.S. blockade.
“He still has that incredible authority of the veteran generation of the revolution,” she said. “Raúl was always quite strict about a delegation of responsibility and unlike Fidel Castro, he had his office hours but big decisions would certainly be consulted with him.”
American cars on Cuba's streets from the 1950s are reminders of the decades‑long U.S. embargo that targeted the Castro regime after the 1959 revolution.
Over the last 67 years, Washington has failed to shift the island back into its sphere of influence. This extends through the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, sanctions imposed the following year, and a diplomatic thaw in 2015 under Barack Obama which saw diplomatic missions reopened when Raúl Castro was president.
“U.S. administrations have failed to understand the deep commitment among Cubans that are very aware of a historical commitment to sovereignty and social justice,” said Yaffe, noting how Raúl was a figurehead for this sentiment.
“That’s the bridge that links the struggle for independence, led by national independence hero José Martí from the end of the 19th century, to the revolutionary movement of the 1950s and then the decision to adopt socialism.”
Threat To Raul
Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, said that Castro’s indictment shows the next phase of the U.S. pressure campaign against the regime in Havana.
“The charges are a clear signal to the Cubans to play ball or else the United States will come after one of the original leaders of the revolution,” he said in comments to Newsweek.
However, Díaz-Canel told Newsweek in an interview last month that Cuba would “fight back” if the U.S. initiated a military conflict and that he did not fear for his own life or freedom, echoing the decades' long defiance of the Cuban leadership against Washington.
Yaffe was in Cuba in January when there was a huge turnout of support to honor the 32 Cuban military personnel who were killed during the U.S. capture of Venezuela's former leader, Nicolás Maduro, from Caracas. Maduro was a key ally of Havana.
“It was an exceptionally cold day,” she told Newsweek. “At least 100,000 Cubans of every walk of life, a mixture of military personnel and civilians stood there for hours in the cold and rain to pay their respects.”
The turnout for those who died protecting the president of another country, “gives some indication of what they would do to protect Raul.”
How Has Havana Reacted?
The indictment was announced on the Cuban equivalent of the Fourth of July, May 20, which marks the founding of the Cuban Republic back in 1902. Cuban-Americans gathered at Miami's Freedom Tower, where more than half a million Cuban refugees were processed as immigrants after fleeing the revolution.
The same day, the U.S. military touted the readiness of aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the southern Caribbean Sea. This followed President Donald Trump's previous threats of military action amid a tight U.S. oil embargo that has prompted an energy crisis, rolling blackouts and protests.
Raúl Castro last appeared in public on 1 May for International Workers’ Day, when he marched wearing a military uniform alongside Díaz-Canel. The Cuban president condemned the U.S. indictment as a “a political action without any legal basis” which sought to justify a military aggression against Cuba.
He on wrote on X that the shootdown of the planes was “legitimate self-defense” after violations of Cuba's airspace by “notorious terrorists.”
Marlene Alejandre-Triana, whose father, Armando Alejandre Jr., was among those killed in the 1996 shootdown described the charges as “long overdue,” The Associated Press reported, and they were also welcomed by the Cuban community in Miami.
Clark Neily, the senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said in a statement to Newsweek that criminal indictments of foreign leaders rarely function purely as prosecution vehicles.
“The legitimacy of accountability efforts-even when legally warranted-depends in part on whether the standards being invoked are ones we are prepared to apply universally,” Neily said.
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This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 10:50 AM.