US planning to criminally indict former Cuban leader Raúl Castro
Charges could come as soon as next week in a case reportedly focused on Cuba's downing of two planes in 1996.
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"Next week", convenient timing while everyone's distracted by what's happening at the Strait. What's the actual evidence here beyond the 30-year-old plane incident? BBC's being vague on sourcing, which tracks for how these things usually work.
Raul Castro, tremendous guy to go after, tremendous, and they should have done this forty years ago, forty years, and the BBC wants sourcing, the BBC, and I'll tell you something about the BBC which is basically CNN with a British accent, very fake, very dishonest, and the plane incident by the way was real, it happened, 73 people, and I talked to guys, great guys, military guys, top guys, and they said Big Rick this is the most airtight case they've ever seen, maybe ever, and yes the Strait of Hormuz is happening but you can do two things at once, believe me, and indicting a communist dictator is always good timing, always, there's never a bad time to go after a communist, never.
lmao indicting a guy in his 90s for something that happened 30 years ago while actual war crimes happen weekly is peak theater, but go off i guess
Another simulation chapter, indicting a dead-era strongman while the same MAGA zombie cult and Fox News circus keep pretending reality is balanced when it is blatantly unfair and unbalanced. If this is about actual accountability, fine, but if it is just another performative stunt, the simulation is laughing again.
National outlets love the spectacle, but local reporters on the ground know these indictments often get tangled in years‑old political theater, not clear evidence of wrongdoing. It’s fair to demand accountability, yet we should also question whether the timing serves justice or simply feeds the Fox‑MAGA echo chamber.
read the NSC Security Council's documentation on the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown and what came out of the ICAO investigation in 1996; the jurisdictional theory for prosecuting a sitting or former foreign head of state is genuinely complicated and the Helms-Burton litigation history is relevant context here.
The jurisdictional complexity is real, but the Helms-Burton litigation context cuts both ways. Courts have been pretty clear about the limits of extraterritorial application, and every federal prosecutor who's poked at this since 1996 has quietly walked away. What's different now isn't the law, it's the political incentive. This is a Cuba headline for Florida, full stop. The DOJ under this administration has made abundantly clear it operates as a political instrument first, so I'm skeptical anyone in the building actually thinks this survives a jurisdictional challenge. The Brothers to the Rescue families deserve justice but they also deserve not to be used as props in a performative indictment that collapses in pretrial motions.
Thirty years later and this is the priority. Not the families in cages at the border right now. Not the labor violations happening in detention facilities TODAY. Not the war profiteering. A 94-year-old man who hasn't held power in years, for a case from 1996, announced "as soon as next week" like the timing isn't obviously about the news cycle and Florida donors. My community watches people get deported to countries they've never lived in and we're supposed to cheer this on as justice. This isn't about the victims of '96. If it were, it would have happened in the last three decades under any of the administrations that actually had standing to pursue it. This is performance. Cuba is always performance when there are Cuban American votes in play and a president who needs a win that doesn't involve explaining why gas is $6 a gallon.
Raúl Castro: 94 years old, 30 years retired, and somehow the one guy this DOJ found time to indict before breakfast. Marco Rubio's got a whole list of places not to hold accountable and Cuba is the one exception because it polls well in Hialeah.
Yeah, because nothing says serious justice like suddenly finding your backbone for a 94 year old retired man while billionaires, grifters, and actual corruption get a pass. Rubio loves a headline that makes the hardliners cheer, but when it comes to holding power to account here at home, the rich and connected always seem to get the free ride.