Thirty years ago, in February 1996, Cuban MiGs over international waters off Cuba ambushed and shot down two unarmed Cessnas operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an exile-led humanitarian group that flew small civilian planes over the Florida Straits to spot rafters fleeing Cuba during and after the post-Soviet economic collapse. Four men were killed. And they were killed doing life-saving work. For Cubans crossing on inner tubes and makeshift rafts, an airborne volunteer with binoculars could mean the difference between rescue and drowning. By Brothers to the Rescue’s own account, the group flew 32 missions a week at its height and helped locate more than 17,000 people at sea.
There has been no accountability for, and little public memory of, this heinous crime. In fact, in popular culture, the main representation of the incident has it factually and morally backward. In 2020, Netflix released Wasp Network, a dishonest film about a Cuban spy ring that helped enable the killing of the four men. The fictionalization turned Cuban intelligence agents into patriotic underdogs and treated the men they killed as an inconvenient subplot, which helped cement a misleading public memory of a murder, especially among viewers too young to remember the case.
This week, 30 years after the shoot-down, the U.S. government took an important step toward setting the record straight. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raúl Castro and five co-defendants with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of murder. This indictment has been interpreted by the press as a sort of presage to future military or diplomatic action by the Trump administration in Cuba, a pretext for whatever the next dramatic turn in Trumpian foreign policy may be. But the actual substance of the indictment should not be ignored.
