The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.
The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government at a moment when President Trump has been seeking to topple it.
The charges brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the vast powers of the U.S. criminal justice system, saddling him with a possible maximum penalty of life in prison. They also raised the possibility that the United States could be paving the way for its military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.
The indictment, which also accused five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the planes, was secretly returned last month by a federal grand jury and built on earlier charges, first filed in 2003, against one of them.
At a news conference in Miami, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, accused Mr. Castro and the pilots of killing four people when the Cuban military shot down the planes on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that often scoured the seas for Cubans fleeing the country.
Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were brought from the sky, claiming that the organization had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights. The indictment said that Raúl Castro was also responsible because he and his brother were “the final decision makers” in the Cuban military chain of command.
Mr. Blanche portrayed the charges against Mr. Castro as a historic step toward holding the leaders of Cuba’s government accountable for its past wrongs.
“My message today is clear,” he said. “The United States and President Trump does not — and will not — forget its citizens.”
Mr. Blanche sidestepped questions about whether the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action, saying that the decision rested with Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team. Mr. Trump himself refused to say on Wednesday whether he would use the military to extract Mr. Castro from Cuba, telling reporters, “I don’t want to say that.”
Beyond military force, however, there were not many options to get Mr. Castro to the United States to face charges. Mr. Blanche said that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, though it was unlikely that the Cubans would turn him over. In a telling statement, Mr. Blanche nonetheless said he expected Mr. Castro to show up in the United States eventually whether “by his own will or another way.”
In an interview, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, warned that the charges appeared to be an attempt by the Trump administration to create a pretext for military action against Cuba.
“I cannot call it another word than a circus — a circus they are now mounting as one more action to justify military aggression against Cuba,” Mr. Guzmán said.
Since retaking office, President Trump has made no secret of his desire to expand U.S. territory and oust leaders he dislikes. After the successful military operation in Venezuela and the so far unsuccessful efforts to secure Greenland or the Panama Canal, Mr. Trump has made it clear that Cuba is his next target.
Cuba is facing a moment of rising crisis as the country’s oil supplies for domestic use and power plants have been exhausted after Mr. Trump effectively imposed a blockade on fuel shipments from any country. On Wednesday, the aircraft carrier Nimitz and its escort warships entered the southern Caribbean Sea, where it is expected to remain for at least a few days, according to the military’s Southern Command and a U.S. official.
The indictment also followed an unusual visit by John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, who met with senior Cuban officials, including Mr. Castro’s grandson, about a week ago. In the talks, he warned the government that it had to make economic changes and stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts on its soil.
In the 30 years since the planes were downed, Cuban American lawmakers, exile activists, survivors of the episode and family members of the victims have called for Raúl Castro, who was the minister of defense at the time, to be criminally charged. But Mr. Blanche had little to say when asked by reporters why an indictment in the case had been returned now.
In a Feb. 13 letter to Mr. Trump, four Republican members of Congress requested that the Justice Department consider indicting Mr. Castro. The letter cited news reports indicating that he had approved the shoot-downs, which the members called “coldblooded murders.”
“We believe unequivocally that Raúl Castro is responsible for this heinous crime,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is time for him to be brought to justice.”
In an interview this year, José Basulto, who ran Brothers to the Rescue, complained that U.S. authorities had not yet acted to hold Mr. Castro accountable.
“Believe me, the thing which is most true is that for 30 years that has elapsed since then, the delay in justice has been the biggest injustice that has taken place,” he said.
Two former federal prosecutors familiar with the case said that past administrations did not have the political will to file charges against such a high-ranking member of an adversarial government.
Mr. Guzmán, in his interview, added that Brothers to the Rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military shot down its planes, and that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. authorities to stop the group’s flights over Cuba, including in a letter from Fidel Castro to President Bill Clinton, a point supported by declassified U.S. documents from the time.
“How many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action?” he asked.
While the investigation into Mr. Castro had been going on for weeks, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Quiñones unsealed the charges on Wednesday. It coincided with Cuban Independence Day, commemorating the end of the U.S. military occupation of the island in 1902.
The news conference was held at the Freedom Tower, where Cubans escaping the communist revolution were processed and received aid. In attendance were influential officials from South Florida, among them mayors, local Cuban American politicians and former prosecutors, including some who had worked on previous efforts to indict Raúl Castro that never bore fruit.
The presence of public officials at a news conference where a criminal indictment was announced was an unusual move, highlighting the political nature of the charges.
Maggie Khuly, 80, the sister of one of the four dead Cuban Americans who were shot down on Feb. 24, 1996, called the charges bittersweet. “It’s good in that justice in our case seems to be progressing,” she said. “It’s bitter in the sense that it’s taking 30 years and you know no good justice would ever be achieved unless we have our dead people back, which is impossible.”
One of the survivors, Sylvia Iriondo, 85, a real estate agent, recalled the specifics of the day, noting how Mr. Basulto had turned to her and said, “We’re next and they’re going to shoot at us,” after he spotted smoke from one of the downed planes. She pulled out a finger rosary as Mr. Basulto flew them to the safety of U.S. airspace.
“I took my husband’s hand in my hand and I started praying,” she said. “We had a sense that something horrible has happened.”
Jack Nicas, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.