US charges Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro with murder

US prosecutors have indicted Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, on charges including murder as Washington escalates its pressure campaign against the communist island.

The US Department of Justice accused Castro of murder over his alleged role in the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft belonging to the Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue which were flying in international airspace at the time, according to US officials. Four people died in the incident.

Castro has also been charged with conspiracy to kill US nationals and the destruction of aircraft.

The indictment against Castro, who is still considered to have the final say in the nation’s politics, is the US’s latest move to force Cuba to open up its economy and release political prisoners.

As Washington maintains a near-total blockage of energy imports to the island, it has imposed new sanctions on Cuban leaders and companies over the past fortnight and issued an implicit threat about the possible use of military force against the regime.

When US special forces stormed Caracas in January and seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the legal pretext for that operation was an indictment against the leader for drug trafficking.

Donald Trump’s administration has been holding talks with Cuba since February. However, US officials last week said there was concern Havana was playing for time ahead of November’s US midterm elections.

The indictment was announced at Miami’s Freedom Tower, which once served as a refugee centre for Cubans seeking asylum. It was part of a series of events to honour victims of the 1996 plane crashes and coincided with Cuba’s 1902 independence day.

Secretary of state Marco Rubio on Wednesday issued a video message to the Cuban people in Spanish saying the “real reason” for shortages and power cuts on the island was that its leaders had “plundered billions of dollars”.

He singled out Gaesa, a military-run conglomerate that controls a significant part of the economy but which he claimed “hoards the profits from its businesses for the benefit of a small elite”.

“President Trump is offering a new relationship between the US and Cuba. But it must be directly with you, the Cuban people, not with Gaesa,” he said.

Economists and former officials say Gaesa is likely to be a central part of the talks between the two governments because any agreement to allow the private sector to play a bigger role in the island’s economy would need to dismantle some of the company’s privileges.

Cuba experts said it was unclear whether the indictment of Castro was a tactic to put more pressure on the island’s leadership or whether it was a way to create a legal and political justification for military action against the country.

After CIA director John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit to Havana last week, an agency official said the administration was prepared to “enforce red lines”, which many analysts took as a reference to the use of force.

A leaked intelligence report at the weekend suggested Cuba had acquired several hundred drones in recent years — a disclosure which analysts said was designed to make the case that the island could be a national security threat.

The shooting down of the two planes has been a longstanding source of anger among members of the Cuban-American community in south Florida. It led in part to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act which codified many of the sanctions on Cuba into law and set out conditions for a return to democracy.

The group was set up to operate search-and-rescue flights in the waters between Cuba and the US. Cuban authorities had accused it of violating the country’s airspace and of distributing anti-Castro leaflets.

In an interview at the time, then-president Fidel Castro said there had been a “general order” to prevent planes entering the country’s airspace but that Raúl Castro, who was then the defence minister, had given the specific order to shoot down the two planes.

In a news conference on Wednesday, Mario Díaz-Balart, a member of Congress from the Miami area, described the incident as a case of “premeditated murder ordered by Raúl Castro himself”.