On 20 May, a federal court in the state of Florida indicted the former Cuban president Raúl Castro over his alleged involvement in downing two civilian planes piloted by US nationals in 1996. Castro was the defense minister of Cuba at the time, and aircraft with the Cuban armed forces carried out the attacks. The charges include one count of conspiracy to kill US nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft and four counts of murder.
On the one hand, the indictment was not a surprise. Immediately after the Trump administration’s bombing of Caracas and extraction of the sitting Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in January – actions bolstered by a similar indictment against Maduro emanating from a federal district court in New York – numerous indicators suggested that Cuba was next on the list. The Castro indictment seemingly confirms these suspicions, though questions remain about what comes next: will US forces carry out a similar bombing and extraction operation in Cuba? Will there be a full-scale invasion of the island? Or will the threat of these actions be enough to force concessions that might, at least in the short term, satisfy Trump officials?
What is certain, however, is that this indictment is not actually meant to protect people from state violence. In fact, in any of the above scenarios, Cuban civilians will suffer tremendously.
To be clear, Cuban civilians are already suffering due to US aggression. US policy has long relied on sanctions and embargoes to pressure Cuban leadership – a strategy that is proven to fall most heavily on civilians – and the Trump administration has intensified these tactics in recent months, mostly notably by cutting off vital oil supplies. Shortages of food, medicine and other materials were already a major problem on the island, and now Cuba is falling into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
Moreover, we can expect impunity for the architects of this suffering because we still have the same legal system that has already justified more than two centuries of imperial violence as perfectly lawful. US imperialism began in earnest on the North American continent with repeated cycles throughout the 18th and 19th centuries of dispossession, removal and even extermination of Indigenous nations. US forces also invaded Mexico in 1846, eventually annexing almost a third of its territory. Still more, US naval forces became increasingly aggressive abroad following precedents set by Thomas Jefferson’s early authorization of force against North African states for alleged “piracy”. The result was a near constant cycle of invading, occupying or annexing territories throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
If you are curious to see just how numerous these invasions were, you should look at the Congressional Research Service’s official list of “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad”. Among the hundreds of examples (which don’t even include campaigns against Native American nations), you might notice that we have invaded Cuba at least 10 times, including four landings in the 1820s to “suppress piracy”, as well as multiyear occupations in 1906 and 1917 to protect “US interests”.
Early US leaders developed numerous legal justifications for state violence abroad, which executive officials still cite today. The above-mentioned “piracy” justification, for example, came up recently as precedent for the Trump administration’s deadly “boat strikes” that started last September. At this point, US forces have exterminated nearly 200 people outside US territory on suspicion of the non-violent crime of carrying drugs. As early as October, public statements by prominent Republicans were already justifying the strikes by invoking Jefferson’s use of force against the “Barbary pirates”, and an official justice department memo in December reiterated this logic.
Another legal tactic with roots in the 19th century was unilaterally accusing foreign actors of some legal transgression – such as alleging damage to US property or some other harm to US nationals – and then demanding an indemnity, only to attack when the payment was not received. There are numerous examples of this pattern playing out, but one particularly consequential case occurred in Greytown, Nicaragua, in 1854.
The episode began when a US steamboat captain murdered a local Nicaraguan resident. A US foreign minister quickly intervened on behalf of the captain to claim immunity from murder charges, and when the Nicaraguan townspeople tried to arrest the captain anyway, the US foreign minister wrote to Washington for help dealing with this “insult”. A US warship arrived soon after to demand a massive indemnity, and when the payment never arrived, it leveled the entire town.
As disturbing as this episode was, a supreme court case a few years later, in 1860 – Durand v Hollins – clarified that this was all perfectly legal, offering sweeping immunity for any accusations of wrongdoing. Significantly, 21st-century justice department memos still cite this case to assert the legality of foreign interventions.
The Castro indictment is best understood as part of this same legal tradition. The violence that we commit can be easily excused. But the law is full of ways to accuse foreign actors of wrongdoing, and this justifies even more state violence that inevitably harms civilians.
This forces us to grapple with a deeper problem in society that goes far beyond the Trump presidency. I myself have argued that the Trump administration acts with a pattern of lawlessness. I stand by this argument, yet the reality is that even if Trump were constrained by law, we still have an imperial legal system that offers impunity for atrocious acts of state violence. Ultimately, we need a legal system that prioritizes human rights over imperial prerogatives. Until we have that, we can expect this to keep happening.
I should also clarify that the point of this argument is not to defend Castro.
The events surrounding the 1996 plane attacks were certainly more complicated than the cherry-picked indictment suggests. For example, the nongovernmental research group the National Security Archive recently published a report using declassified documents showing that the “US nationals” behind the flights were intentionally provoking a confrontation with Cuba by repeatedly violating the island’s airspace, and that they ignored numerous warnings to stop from both the US and Cuban governments.
Regardless, when states kill unarmed civilians, that always horrifies me. From a moral perspective, it’s plausible that we should call this murder. And if this indictment were a good-faith attempt at making sure government actors – including our own leaders – can’t just kill unarmed civilians without consequences, I would be all for it.
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But that’s simply not what the Castro indictment is. By all appearances, it’s actually a pretext to enact even more state violence against Cuba, which will fall heavily on civilian populations that are already suffering from our policies.
Undoing the imperial legal system that enables this violence will be a long-term process. But the first step is to refuse normalization. It shouldn’t be normal for states to terrorize civilians with impunity. What should be normal is civil society demanding an end to these cycles of violence.
