The confession came almost four months after the planes exploded over the Caribbean Sea: “I told them to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, but they would enter Havana and leave.” It was June 1996, and the 11-minute, 32-second statement was recorded and later transferred to an old compact disc. “Of course, with one of those missiles, air-to-air, what comes down is a ball of fire that will fall on the city.” The man speaking didn’t know then that he was revealing the crime that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the downing of two planes belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue non-profit organization. “Well, knock them down into the sea when they reappear; and don’t consult those who have the authority.” The speaker was Raúl Castro. The U.S. Department of Justice now intends to prosecute him for the deaths of the four crew members, more than three decades ago.

On May 20, an unprecedented event could take place in the mecca of Cuban exiles: the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida is set to formally present its indictment against Castro in a ceremony at the Freedom Tower in Miami. This initiative comes amid the Trump administration’s siege against the regime on the island. Since the Republican president announced in January that Cuba was “next,” following the incursion into Venezuela to arrest Nicolás Maduro, Cubans have been watching closely for any sign that might shed light on Trump’s uncertain plans.

It’s hard for people to imagine a figure like Castro, now 94, being transferred to a maximum-security prison in the United States so near the end of his life. He’s no longer the powerful man who can sit down and talk with the United States, as he did during Barack Obama’s presidency in 2016. Now he sends his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, to carry on his legacy. Time, however, hasn’t lessened his debt, nor has old age granted him any special treatment among the exile community. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see Raúl Castro before a U.S. court,” says Arnaldo Iglesias, 88, in his Miami home. “But I would like the full recognition of the truth. I want it established that four men were murdered by a dictatorship during a humanitarian mission.”

Iglesias’ memory has not erased the events of that February 24, 1996, when the two Cessna C-337 planes carrying his Brothers to the Rescue comrades were shot down between 3:21 p.m. and 3:27 p.m. by Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets. A third plane, carrying Iglesias, managed to escape. “I remember the voices on the radio, the uncertainty, and then the silence. A silence that defies explanation.”

A week earlier, Iglesias had seen his friends all smiles in Nassau, Bahamas, during a Brothers to the Rescue humanitarian mission. The group was conducting search and rescue operations in the Florida Straits, with exiles and the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, to assist those who took to the sea from Cuba, the so-called rafters. Iglesias never saw Armando Alejandre, 45, Carlos Costa, 29, Mario de la Peña, 24, or Pablo Morales, 29, again. He still remembers details about each of them, as if time hasn’t taken them away.

“Carlos Costa had a special calmness. Mario de la Peña was an enthusiastic young man and a consummate environmentalist. Pablo Morales was a rafter rescued by us, helping others to achieve the freedom he already enjoyed, and Armando Alejandre Jr., an exemplary Cuban,” he says. “Thirty years later, I still think about them almost every day.”

The survivors, the families of the victims, and the exile community that has for years mourned the four Brothers to the Rescue crew members have patiently waited for justice to be served against the Castro regime. Nothing, so far, has happened. Five administrations have come and gone in the White House without a response, despite the fact that it has been proven the planes were shot down over international waters, not Cuban airspace, and that the U.S. Congress condemned the events on March 12, 1996. That year, Judge James Lawrence King ruled that the Castro regime had murdered “four human beings in international airspace over the Florida Straits.” Cuba refused to compensate the victims’ families, but the United States did so with $93 million in frozen Cuban government assets.

After Trump’s first term, during which he barely paid any attention to Cuba, perhaps no one in Havana expected him to now dedicate so much time to the island. Events indicate that Washington is determined to fight back: a nearly five-month-long oil embargo has been compounded by threats, negotiations, visits from officials, $100 million in humanitarian aid, and the revelation that Castro could face prosecution in U.S. courts. There is one piece of evidence now available to federal judges that forms the cornerstone of the ongoing case: a voice recording in which Raúl Castro admits that he gave the order to shoot down the planes.

Brothers to the Rescue at the center of politics

That audio fell into the hands of Cuban journalist Wilfredo Cancio in 2006, based in Miami and at the time a reporter covering Cuban affairs for El Nuevo Herald. Castro had assumed the presidency of Cuba a few days earlier, due to Fidel’s illness. Ten years prior, as Cuba’s Minister of Defense and head of the Armed Forces, he had admitted his responsibility for the attack on the planes in a meeting with journalists from the island.

Cancio verified the recording with several specialists and with Alcibiades Hidalgo, who was Castro’s personal secretary. It was his voice. On August 20, 2006, he published an exclusive report that garnered worldwide media attention. “What changes with this recording is that there is now voice evidence of Raúl Castro assuming full responsibility,” the journalist told EL PAÍS, adding that he sees the planned indictment as “an act of historical justice.” When asked if the FBI had contacted him at any point regarding the investigation, he declined to comment.

The case of the downing of the planes has followed the course of events dictated by South Florida politics. “In the 1990s, there were formal charges and accusations that were dropped by the Bill Clinton administration, which was difficult for the families of the four men killed to accept,” Iglesias recounts. Two years after the recording was made public, it was once again put on hold with Barack Obama’s arrival at the White House and the diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries. Castro not only visited the United Nations headquarters in New York but also hosted the Democrat for a two-day stay in the Cuban capital. Former spy Gerardo Hernández, linked to the attack on the planes, was sentenced in the United States to life imprisonment and then sent to Cuba in 2014 as part of a prisoner exchange.

Republicans, for their part, have called for Castro’s head: Rick Scott, former governor of Florida, and the current governor, Ron DeSantis, are demanding that the Justice Department file charges. CBS News broke the news about Castro’s possible prosecution on the same day that the CIA director arrived in Havana last week. “Everything that is being done is a form of pressure on Cuba and a symbolic act of justice, albeit belated, but justice nonetheless. There is pressure in Congress and in the community to prosecute Raúl and Fidel as those responsible for the crime,” Cancio comments. “The fact that accountability is being discussed again today sends an important message: state crimes do not simply disappear with the passage of time.”

In 1996, Fidel himself said that he was the one who gave the order that small planes could no longer fly over Cuban airspace to drop leaflets, as they had done before. “They had a general order not to allow it… They acted with full awareness that they were following orders… I take responsibility for that,” the late leader said. However, the leaked audio shows that the order was actually given by his brother Raúl.

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There is a man who whispers in Raúl Castro’s ear. He speaks to him during the May Day parade in Havana or puts his arm in the way if a woman tries to take the former president’s hand—as though she needs reassurance that he is still alive. When Castro delivered speeches in Revolution Square—always less fiery than his brother Fidel’s—this man stood behind him, steadfast in the scorching tropical heat. When Raúl received Pope Francis in the Cuban capital, the same man was there, watching his every move. Those who know him say he is Castro’s “darling.” They also say he has an extra finger due to a congenital condition, and that his inner circle has given him a nickname: El Cangrejo—The Crab. His name is Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro; he is Raúl’s grandson and his bodyguard. For months now, however, he seems to be guarding something far larger: not just his grandfather’s back, but the fate of his country.

Rodríguez Castro has become the bodyguard not only of Castro but also of the negotiations between Cuba and the United States. El Cangrejo has been present at the talks that have been taking place since the start of the year—talks Cuba initially denied were happening. El Cangrejo traveled to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit to meet with advisers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. When President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged for the first time in March that they were negotiating with the Trump administration, El Cangrejo was there. El Cangrejo was spotted in a solemn position at the farewell ceremony for the Cuban military personnel killed during the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro. El Cangrejo took part in the visit of U.S. officials to Havana on April 10, during which Cuba was presented with an ultimatum to release political prisoners—one it failed to meet. And this past Thursday, when the head of the CIA landed on the island to “seriously address economic and security issues,” El Cangrejo could not be absent.

Even so, almost no Cuban today can explain what role Rodríguez Castro plays at the moment of greatest tension in decades between Washington and Havana. People barely know how he speaks, what his voice sounds like, or what he thinks or believes. “El Cangrejo matters because he is family, not because he has any individual political capital of his own, beyond being a trusted member of a family clan,” says Cuban intellectual Alina Bárbara López.

Once, in 2017, a young man was spotted on a platform at Varadero beach, sweating, singing, and dancing to the reggaeton beat of the popular duo Gente de Zona. He would have gone unnoticed were it not for what was written on his shirt: he was wearing a New York Yankees jersey with the words “El Cangrejo” emblazoned across it in large letters. Other extravagances from those years also drew attention: yacht trips, lobster fishing, VIP parties, flights on private planes.

Yet people still know very little about Rodríguez Castro beyond what he and his family have chosen to reveal. Juan Almeida García, son of the late Cuban Vice President Juan Almeida Bosque, who grew up in Raúl’s household as a child, says that El Cangrejo is without question “his favorite grandson.” Being the firstborn grandson, combined with the insecurities he carried from being born with a sixth finger, led Castro to be fiercely overprotective. “Raúl Castro has always been very attached to him, and the boy grew up with a rather exaggerated degree of protection from his grandfather,” says Almeida, who was present on the day of his birth—March 24, 1984.

Now 41, Rodríguez Castro is the son of Raul’s daughter Deborah and the late General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the man who built the GAESA military and economic conglomerate and who died suddenly in 2022. Rodríguez López-Calleja was a figure who was widely considered a potential future leader of Cuba. He studied at the Los Camilitos military academy, graduated with a degree in Accounting and Finance from the University of Havana, and in 2016 was appointed lieutenant colonel in the Ministry of the Interior and head of Castro’s Personal Security Directorate.

Although Castro made him his bodyguard, in reality, “the grandfather is the one who takes care of the grandson and not the grandson who takes care of the grandfather,” says Almeida, who assures that El Cangrejo cultivated a “quite egocentric” personality.

For a long time, people couldn’t guess who the young man who was always seen guarding Raúl was. Today, he is invisible to no one. Maidelys Solano, who is currently desperate because of the power outage in her Bayamo neighborhood, has heard a lot of talk lately about El Cangrejo. “People know who he is, and many say he’s the one who’s going to lead the transition in Cuba; that’s what everyone’s saying. But I think he has to go too, because he’s also benefited from all this,” she says.

Amidst negotiations that escalate and de-escalate each month, where Havana denies details that Washington asserts and where secrecy keeps Cubans on edge, many questions arise surrounding the figure of El Cangrejo: What is the role of someone who holds no institutional or political office, at least not publicly? Or why is he a constant presence in the dialogues with Washington, in which, for example, Díaz-Canel has never been seen, nor has his uncle, Alejandro Castro Espín?

For Cuban historian and writer Enrique del Risco, several possibilities exist: “The most obvious is that El Cangrejo is a frontman for Alejandro Castro Espín, until a few years ago Raúl’s clearest successor,” he maintains. Espín, Castro’s only son, mediated during the talks with the Barack Obama administration that led to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations, but disappeared from public view after the so-called Havana Syndrome affair.

The other possibility del Risco sees is that El Cangrejo “is being groomed as the true successor to the dynasty, and despite never having held any government position, they want to present him to society as a new figure of power.” “His presence in the dialogues would be justified by the need to invest him with an authority he hasn’t acquired until now as a member of the Castro regime. The fact that no one within the regime dares to question the decision to make him a representative of the Cuban government without ever having been part of it gives us an idea of ​​the absolute lack of judgment of a regime that a family runs as if it were their own private business,” the historian asserts.

The hidden power in Cuba

The CIA arrived in Havana with a mission: to personally convey President Trump’s message that the United States is willing to seriously address economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes, an agency official told Fox News, adding that El Cangrejo had participated in the meeting.

Although it has been confirmed that Castro’s grandson is part of the negotiation process, the image released by the CIA focuses on Ramón Romero Curbelo, the head of intelligence services in Cuba, a face that Cubans barely recognize or wouldn’t imagine could be the one calling the shots in the country. The image has brought to the forefront of public debate a question that remains unanswerable: Who really runs the island today, or is the power structure even identifiable?

The intellectual Alina Bárbara Rodríguez, who has directly faced repression, claims to have noticed what she calls “a formal and an informal power” on the island. The former is occupied by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, along with Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, and others who hold positions in the government or the Communist Party. The latter power is unnameable. “It’s that hidden, deep, informal state; it’s difficult to know because it’s not designed for us to know. But it’s clear that there’s a very close relationship between them, one that involves family, patronage, and a technocratic military structure. And Curbelo’s figure is fundamental to that apparatus. That’s why none of the people connected to the formal state are present at the most important meetings,” Rodríguez maintains.

Beyond the statement from the Communist Party of Cuba, which insists that the meeting with the CIA made it clear that Cuba does not represent a threat to U.S. national security, the encounter with the agency’s director, John Ratcliffe, leaves several implicit messages. “First, it confirms that there is an effort on the part of the U.S. government to produce some kind of change in Cuba, beyond what previous administrations have done,” asserts historian and political scientist Armando Chaguaceda. “Whether that change translates into an economic shift, a step toward capitalism, with a political realignment in favor of the U.S. without democratization—which is not the goal for which we Cubans have fought—remains to be seen.”

Time accelerated in Cuba this Thursday to the rhythm of sensational news and images—among them, the CIA director in Havana, something unseen in seven decades of Castroism. The day ended with reasonable certainty that change is approaching on an island on the verge of collapse: change imposed from Washington, after more than four months of economic and political pressure from the Trump administration to hasten the end of the regime. So this Friday, both Washington and Cuba woke up watching out for the next milestones on an uncertain timeline, with the U.S. president and his strongman, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, aboard Air Force One on their way back from China.

First came the formalization of Washington’s offer of 100 million dollars to “provide direct assistance to the Cuban people” through the Catholic Church. An offer that Cuba’s leaders initially rejected before accepting it, acknowledging that the mission undertaken with the military intervention in Venezuela in January—cutting off the island’s fuel supply—is producing its final effects.

Then came the release of political prisoner Sissi Abascal Zamora, who immediately traveled into exile. Shortly after, confirmation that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Havana, evidenced by a series of photographs that forced one to look twice, arrived. Last was the leak to U.S. media that a federal prosecutor from southern Florida—home to an exile community that lives in anxious anticipation of any sign of Castroism’s end—was preparing an uncertain legal gambit: indicting 94-year-old Raúl Castro for the 1996 shootdown of two small planes belonging to Hermanos de Rescate, a humanitarian organization based in Miami. Four people were killed in that attack. The potential legal move would represent a new pressure measure in what appears to be Washington’s strategy toward Havana—similar to the one employed against Venezuela, or even Iran.

In the rhetorical escalation from Trump and his administration, the “takeover” of the island is treated as a foregone conclusion. But with events moving this fast, it is no longer so clear that it will arrive, as the Republican promised, once the Middle East crisis has been resolved. The war against Iran remains mired in a stalemate of rejected peace proposals and the collapse of global energy trade caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. president has been absorbed this week by Taiwan and his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the reporters traveling with him on Air Force One did not ask him about Cuba—depriving the world of another serving of his contradictory messages.

The CIA director, who arrived with a warning to Havana to refrain from intelligence cooperation with China and Russia, is the highest-ranking member of the U.S. government to set foot on the island since Trump’s campaign began. His presence marks a step forward in Washington’s pressure strategy, and its timing did not appear to be left to chance: it came one day after Vicente de la O Levy, Cuba’s Minister of Energy and Mines, announced that oil supplies for domestic consumption and power plants had run out—including the million barrels of Russian-origin oil that Washington had allowed through in April.

“We have absolutely no fuel, absolutely no diesel. In Havana, blackouts today exceed 20 or 22 hours a day,” said the minister, who chose to skip the part where his compatriots—perennially on the edge of the abyss, always pushed a little further—protested by banging pots in streets blocked by piles of accumulated garbage they set on fire, beside useless gas stations. “This dramatic deterioration has a single cause,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X: “The genocidal energy blockade to which the United States subjects our country.”

The Trump administration’s decision to send Ratcliffe to sit across the negotiating table from Cuba’s Interior Minister, Lázaro Álvarez Casas, and the island’s intelligence chief, General Ramón Romero Curbelo—a meeting the CIA conveniently made public—did not only stir doubts about who is really in charge in Cuba. It also fed the enigma surrounding a figure who has risen to prominence as Washington tightens its stranglehold on the island: Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as El Cangrejo, The Crab, the grandson and bodyguard of Raúl Castro.

In a pre-recorded interview with NBC aired Thursday night, Marco Rubio—himself a son of the exile community—insisted that Cuba’s prosperity is a matter of “national interest” for the United States. “We don’t want a failed state 150 kilometers from our shores,” he warned. Rubio has also repeatedly said that Washington could settle for sweeping economic reforms, leaving the more drastic changes to Cuba’s political structure for a later date—or, to put it plainly, replicating the Venezuelan model and applying it to the island that for years was Chavismo’s main pillar of support.

The parallels, however, and the prospects of exporting that model, are not absolute. Castroism is not Chavismo. And the degree of direct U.S. government involvement is not identical either. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has on several occasions expressed doubts about the regime’s competence: he tends to argue that it is the ineptitude of Cuba’s leaders, not the embargo or other U.S. pressure measures, that has ruined the island’s economy.

Rubio repeated that idea again this week, in an interview with Fox News, where he expressed skepticism about the possibility of “changing Cuba’s trajectory while those people remain in charge.”

To those arguments, the CIA added another on Thursday—equally well-worn—in the statement that followed the Havana meeting: Cuba, the text charged, is a “haven for U.S. adversaries,” in a barely veiled reference to Russia and China.

The Cuban Communist Party described the meeting with the CIA director—a senior official they had already received in Havana in secret during the Obama years—as “part of efforts to address the current situation.” The Interior Ministry, which oversees the island’s vast apparatus of espionage and repression, spoke of “developing bilateral cooperation” and defended its “unequivocal condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations.”

With those words, the regime added euphemism to the repertoire of contradictory positions its officials have wielded in recent months while absorbing Washington’s pressure. The messaging has swung between willingness to cooperate with Washington and warnings that “any external aggressor” would meet “impregnable resistance”—while Trump floats the idea of sending a powerful aircraft carrier to finish the job. Meanwhile, and despite pressure from U.S. negotiators, the mass release of political prisoners has yet to materialize.

In February, it emerged that Rubio had been in contact with El Cangrejo, and that the latter had traveled to the capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis, on the sidelines of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit, to meet with the Secretary of State’s advisers. In March, President Díaz-Canel—whose own role in this process is also in question—acknowledged for the first time that they were negotiating with the Trump administration. Then came the first visit by a U.S. delegation to Havana on April 10th.

Thursday’s visit—for which Ratcliffe arrived aboard a Boeing C-40B Clipper from Andrews Air Force Base, used for official travel by the U.S. president and other senior officials due to its proximity to Washington—was the second since Trump’s pressure campaign began. What comes next—whether only economic change is applied, a comprehensive political reform is undertaken, a supervised transitional state along Venezuelan lines emerges, or simply more of the same continues—remains unknown in a Cuba on the brink of collapse, where this week, time sped up.