Brothers to the Rescue was founded by José Basulto, a veteran of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and CIA collaborator with a history of violent actions against Cuba. In 1961, Basulto was involved in a plot to bomb a missile base in Havana. A year later, he helped position a boat armed with a 20mm cannon off the coast of Havana and fired on the Hornedo de Rosita hotel, where he believed Fidel Castro would be dining, according to the Atlantic.

“I was trained as a terrorist by the United States,” Basulto said.

The following account draws in large part from Back Channel to Cuba by William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, who document the diplomatic exchanges and events leading up to the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.

Brothers to the Rescue began in 1991 by flying search and rescue missions for Cuban rafters. But after a 1994 immigration accord sharply reduced the flow of migrants across the Florida Straits, the group shifted from rescue work to overt provocation. “They started . . . to carry out a political agenda of harassing and threatening the Cuban government,” recalled Richard Nuccio, then White House special advisor on Cuba. Brothers to the Rescue pilots repeatedly violated Cuban airspace, dropping religious medallions and anti-government leaflets over Havana, including one, as documented by LeoGrande and Kornbluh, urging Cubans to “Change Things Now.”

Basulto was open about the flights’ purpose. After one 1995 flyover of Havana, he declared: “We want confrontation.” The mission, he said, was meant to show that “the regime is not invulnerable.”

The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington that the flights were illegal and dangerous. Cuban officials filed diplomatic protests, sent evidence to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and made clear that if the incursions continued, Cuba could down the planes. US officials knew the danger was real. In a January 1996 email, obtained by the National Security Archive, FAA official Cecilia Capestany informed her superiors that “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.”

Yet Washington failed to stop the flights. Cuban officials used every means of communication available: diplomatic notes, military briefings, intermediaries, and back-channel contacts to make clear their patience had run out.

On February 24, 1996, three Brothers to the Rescue Cessnas took off from Florida after filing a false flight plan claiming they were searching for rafters at sea. In reality, the mission was once again intended to penetrate Cuban airspace.

As the aircraft approached the island, Cuban controllers immediately warned the aircraft not to cross into their airspace. “You run danger by penetrating that side,” they replied.

“We are ready to do it,” Basulto responded, as documented by the National Security Archive. “It is our right as free Cubans.”

Not long after, Cuban fighter jets shot down two of the aircraft, killing all four men aboard. Basulto’s plane managed to return to Miami.

The downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes was not only used to demonize Cuba. It also reshaped US policy for decades.

Before the incident, the Clinton administration had been cautiously exploring limited openings with Havana. But after the planes were shot down, hard-liners in Congress seized the moment. Inside the White House, some officials warned against overreaction. Brothers to the Rescue had “been playing with fire,” Nuccio told senior adviser Sandy Berger. “They got exactly what they were hoping to produce.”

The warning went unheeded. Bill Clinton quickly moved to support the Helms–Burton Act, which codified the US embargo into law, and through its Title III, expanded its extraterritorial reach, allowing US nationals to sue foreign companies accused of “trafficking” in property nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. Clinton and every president since him suspended Title III for more than two decades, until Donald Trump activated the provision in 2019, unleashing dozens of lawsuits that resulted in an exodus of foreign investment from the island.

The Brothers to the Rescue shootdown also became central to the prosecution of Gerardo Hernández, one of the Cuban Five, a group of operatives who were sent undercover to South Florida to monitor terrorist organizations linked to attacks against civilians in Cuba. In 1998, Cuban officials handed the FBI extensive documentation detailing dozens of US-financed terrorist plots. The FBI responded by arresting the agents who had infiltrated the terrorist networks. Hernández was convicted in 2001, in a highly controversial trial, on conspiracy charges related to the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, despite no evidence that he participated in, ordered, or had foreknowledge of the decision to down the aircraft.

Nearly three decades later, the same incident is once again being weaponized to target Castro, stripped of the broader context in which it occurred. Missing from the Justice Department’s indictment is the long history of violent, Florida-based extremists targeting Cuba, which has continued into the present day.

On February 25, 2026, a Florida-registered boat carrying ten armed men exchanged fire with the Cuban coast guard one mile off Cuba’s northern coast. According to Cuba’s Interior Ministry, the men opened fire first, injuring a Cuban commander. After the firefight, five of the men were killed, and the boat was seized, along with more than 12,000 rounds of ammunition, sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, bulletproof vests, and night-vision equipment. All ten men on board were reportedly Cuban-born residents of the United States.

The incident was the latest episode in a decades-long campaign of armed attacks, sabotage, and terrorism directed at Cuba from US soil, often with impunity and, at times, tacit political protection in Miami and Washington.

The most infamous example is Cubana Flight 455. Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles are widely believed to have masterminded the 1976 bombing of the civilian airliner, which exploded off the coast of Barbados, killing all seventy-three people on board. At the time, it was the deadliest act of airline terrorism in the western hemisphere. The victims included children and every member of Cuba’s national fencing team.

The FBI later described Bosch’s organization, Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), as an “anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization,” while former US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an “unrepentant terrorist.” Posada Carriles was implicated in a long string of violent operations spanning decades, including a 1997 bombing campaign targeting hotels in Havana that killed an Italian tourist and injured several others.

Far from prosecuting Bosch and Posada Carriles, the United States ultimately shielded both men. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush allowed Bosch to remain in the country despite a 1989 Justice Department ruling that sought to deport him, citing “substantial proof concerning his past and present terrorist activities.” Posada Carriles, meanwhile, escaped from a Venezuelan prison while awaiting trial for the Cubana flight bombing and later resurfaced in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal (see declassified records about Posada Carriles in the National Security Archive). After illegally entering the United States in 2005, Posada Carriles was protected from extradition to Venezuela and Cuba and was never tried in the United States for the bombing of the Cubana flight.

Both Posada Carriles and Bosch lived freely in Miami until their deaths.

Miami is ground zero for the double standard driving US policy toward Cuba. The Cuban American hard-liners who dominate the city’s politics have long espoused violence, terrorism, and collective punishment against Cuba in the name of “freedom” and “human rights.” Unsurprisingly, the current push to indict Castro came three months after Cuban American hard-liners from Florida urged the Justice Department to do exactly that.

“This was a long thought-out thing that I wanted to do,” Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL) told USA Today. “And I thought this is the president that would do it.”

The hypocrisy does not end at the Florida Straits. Since the turn of the century, the United States has bombed targets across multiple countries without declarations of war, without UN authorization, and often with little regard for civilian victims. More recently, across the Caribbean and Pacific, the United States has carried out military strikes with a level of impunity that makes Cuba’s actions in 1996 look restrained by comparison.

While Washington and Miami prepare indictments against a ninety-four-year-old man over a three-decade-old incident, the Trump administration has spent recent months executing people in boats in international waters with zero accountability. Since September 2025, the United States has launched nearly sixty military strikes against vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific under Operation Southern Spear, claiming to target “narco-traffickers” and “terrorist organizations.”

The operations have killed at least 193 people, in part due to tactics such as disguised military aircraft and “double tap” strikes on an already disabled vessel, targeting survivors after an initial attack. Almost no evidence has been presented to the public. Satellite images are classified. Intercepts are withheld. Even the names of the dead are not released. Victims of US firepower are seldom granted the dignity of public recognition.

These extrajudicial killings reflect a familiar double standard in US foreign policy: that the United States’ own violence is legitimate while the violence of its adversaries is not, even in cases of self-defense.

The pending indictment is not simply a means to settle a decades-old score; rather, it serves present foreign policy goals aimed at transforming shaky criminal charges into a legal pretext for regime change and possibly military intervention.

According to NBC News, Trump “has grown increasingly frustrated with the Cuban government’s ability to maintain power” and has been “pressing his advisers” about why collapse has not yet happened despite unprecedented extraterritorial sanctions and an oil blockade that is causing a humanitarian crisis. While administration officials believe the Cuban government will fall before the end of the year, Trump “has found that timeline insufficient.”

With escalated economic warfare failing to bring about the Cuban government’s collapse, the Department of Defense is drafting plans for possible military action against Cuba.

The only missing piece is a legal pretext. The “narco-terrorism” charge used to justify the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro cannot easily be applied to Cuba. For decades, the “consensus position” within the US intelligence community has been that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism. Meanwhile, the State Department has long considered Cuba a key US partner in counter-narcotics cooperation.

The indictment against Castro would seem to provide a justification, albeit a flimsy one, for military action. Far from being the culmination of a long search for accountability, the case appears to lay the legal groundwork for a new and more violent phase in Washington’s siege on Cuba.