He’s a “thin, limpish, bespectacled 94-year-old grandfather” whose revolutionary days are long gone, said Daniel DePetris in The Telegraph, yet he’s a wanted man in the US for all that. Raúl Castro has been a dominant figure in Cuba’s communist regime since his brother Fidel seized power in 1959.
Cuba’s defence chief from 1959 to 2008 and its president from 2006 to 2018, he still wields great influence behind the scenes. So it’s quite something that the US attorney general has now charged him with a murder he’s said to have been involved in back in 1996 – the fatal downing of two civilian planes over the Straits of Florida.
The four victims of that attack, three of them US citizens, had been working for Brothers to the Rescue, an NGO dedicated to helping Cuban refugees and dropping anti-communist leaflets over the island. Castro is accused of having instructed his fighter pilots to “knock them down into the sea when they show up”.
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You could see this coming, said Diario de Cuba (Madrid). The Trump administration has been demanding that Havana open up its economy and end political repression; yet despite heavy US sanctions and an oil blockade imposed in January, the regime has made no more than limited concessions – allowing Cubans in exile to found companies back home, for example. So the indictment of Raúl Castro is a “warning for a deaf regime”. And quite possibly an effective one.
The regime was badly shaken when, in January, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was captured by US forces in a surprise raid on Caracas. And US Attorney General Todd Blanche has hinted something similar might occur in Cuba. Asked how he intended to bring Castro to trial in America, he cryptically replied there are “all kinds of different ways”.
Bringing in Castro would be a major blow to the regime, said CNN (Atlanta). Regarded as his late brother’s “more disciplined and discreet” enforcer, Raúl Castro remains “the power in the shadows”. And his family holds immense economic as well as political clout: GAESA, the military-run conglomerate Castro founded in 1995, controls 70% of the economy on some estimates: Cuba’s tourist industry is just one of the sectors it dominates.
Markets empty, prices soaring
That economy is now suffering its “greatest crisis” since the collapse of its close ally the Soviet Union, said The Washington Post. The oil embargo has driven it to the brink. “Havana looks like a bombed-out city,” said Yunior García Aguilera on 14YMedio (Havana). Its buildings, crumbling from decades of neglect, are “split open like broken ribs”. With no petrol to run dustbin trucks, rubbish is being burnt in the streets. People wade through “toxic clouds”, side-stepping sewage and hopping over pot-holes. “Plastic, rotten food and patience are all ablaze.”
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And with no imports reaching the island, Cubans have to eat what’s grown locally, said CiberCuba (Valencia). Which isn’t much. Rice production had plummeted even before the fuel crisis. Without fuel for crop dusters, tractors or irrigation, farmers have “reverted to using oxen, buffalo, horses, windmills, and solar pumps”. Markets are empty, prices are soaring. Most Cubans have begun skipping meals.
The US hopes such suffering will spark a “mass uprising” and cause the regime to implode, said Fabio E. Fernández Batista in El Salto (Madrid). But such is the repressive nature of the regime, that seems unlikely, which is why not a few Cubans now hope that “Saint Donald” will come to the rescue, even “if it means bombs falling” on their homeland.
And the US appears “increasingly willing” to seek regime change in Cuba through military means, said Nahal Toosi on Politico (Washington) – by an air strike or possibly even a ground invasion. The signs are all there: there’s been a reported spike in US surveillance flights off Cuba, and last week the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was sent to the Caribbean. Some assume the ongoing failure of his war in Iran will hold the US president back. Don’t bet on it. It’s never a good idea “to predict what the capricious Trump will do”.
