Iraq. Libya. Venezuela. Now Cuba.
We are writing at a moment of grave urgency. Washington is not pursuing accountability. It is laying the groundwork for regime change and war.
The reported indictment of the 94-year-old former Cuban president Raúl Castro is timed to coincide with a Justice Department ceremony at Miami’s Freedom Tower on Cuban Independence Day, staged for the exile lobby that has spent decades waging an ideological and commercial war against the Cuban Revolution. The political motivation is plain. “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.”
This is not the first time Washington has fabricated a legal pretext to justify a war it has already decided to wage. Iraq. Libya. Venezuela. The sequence is familiar. Iran has lived under this architecture for forty-five years, sanctions, indictments, designations, assassinations, a slow siege that has now broken into open military confrontation. Cuba is next in line. Even within the administration, there is no serious claim that Cuba threatens American interests, yet in the same breath, officials are circulating claims about Cuban drone acquisitions with the urgency of a justification for military action. The CIA director visited Havana this week. New sanctions were imposed. Every element of this escalation points in the same direction.
The indictment has no legal foundation. It rests on the false premise that Cuba had no right to defend its own airspace. Between 1994 and 1996, Cuba issued more than 25 formal warnings to the US government regarding Brothers to the Rescue aircraft repeatedly violating Cuban airspace, notifying the State Department, the FAA, and international aviation authorities, all of whom had both the power and the legal obligation to halt the flights. They refused. US officials knew exactly what was coming. A January 1996 FAA email warned that Cuba might shoot down one of the planes. The night before the incident, a White House adviser requested the flights be grounded. The FAA refused again. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter, every sovereign nation possesses the inherent right to defend its territory after exhausting diplomatic means. Cuba had done exactly that. The United States bears responsibility for what followed. And while it pursues a 94-year-old for an act of territorial defense, the men responsible for actual terrorism against Cuba died free.
Take the case of Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile and CIA operative responsible for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976, which killed all seventy-three passengers on board including the entire Cuban national fencing team. Rather than face justice, Posada Carriles lived freely in Miami until his death, protected from extradition by the same government now invoking accountability. This has been the pattern of US policy toward Cuba and the Cuban exile community for decades, key figures in the United States supporting every effort to undermine the Cuban Revolution and the model it represents for countries around the world.
This is not justice. It is the deliberate construction of a pretext for the next phase of Washington’s siege on Cuba.
Eleven million Cubans are living through nearly twenty-four-hour blackouts, severe shortages of food and medicine, and an oil blockade designed to break the back of a nation, all in outlandish violation of international law and existing international conventions on human rights. This reign of terror has sought to intimidate every country in the region and beyond into bowing to US domination. Cuba is not a threat and has never been a threat. For 33 consecutive years, the overwhelming majority of the world has voted at the United Nations to condemn the US embargo. The United States is on the wrong side of history.
Global Exchange stands with citizens throughout the world in unwavering solidarity with the people of Cuba. The global support for Cuba is a sign that people everywhere will not be silent while the US attempts to force Cuba back to the Batista era, an era of drugs, mafia, and submission to US imperial policy. We will not be silent as this administration builds the case for war.
We call on movements, communities, and people of conscience to refuse this narrative and resist this escalation. Cuba’s right to sovereignty is not negotiable. Neither is our solidarity.
Cuba is not alone in this moment of global war. Take action. Make your voice heard from your community to Congress and beyond.
If you’re in the Bay Area, drop off humanitarian aid.
Cuba is not alone. And we will not be silent.