DOJ pushing to indict Raúl Castro over 1996 downing of civilian planes, officials say

Economic conditions have grown steadily worse since the Trump administration’s months-long blockade of oil shipments. Cuba is suffering a massive energy crisis with fuel shortages and blackouts.

Still, the Cuban regime has shown little sign of ceding power or offering major concessions as Washington demands.

Trump, on Air Force One back from a China trip Friday, said the Castro investigation was a question for the Justice Department.

“You talk about a declining country, they are really a nation or a country in decline,” Trump said. “So we’re going to see.”

The president has kept up a drumbeat of threats against Cuba, suggesting earlier this month that an aircraft carrier returning from the Middle East might make a detour to there. The warship could “come in, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say: ‘Thank you very much. We give up,’” Trump said.

Senior Trump administration officials have stepped up their efforts in recent weeks to pressure Havana.

The State Department announced new hard-hitting sanctions on Cuba earlier this month, penalizing foreign firms doing business with Havana. But officials also offered Cuba $100 million in humanitarian assistance if the regime would agree to “meaningful” reforms.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who typically keeps his international travel confidential, made a high-profile trip to Havana on Thursday, holding a meeting with Cuban officials as he delivered a stern warning demanding dramatic changes without delay, according to a CIA official and a statement from the Cuban government.

“Director Ratcliffe traveled to Havana to initiate substantive discussions on the essential steps the Cuban regime must do to build a productive relationship with the United States,” a CIA official said in an email on Thursday.

The director made clear that time was short and Cuba needed to act, suggesting that if the regime dragged its feet, it might face the same fate as the government in Venezuela, according to the CIA official.

Ratcliffe “emphasized that the U.S. is extending a genuine opportunity for collaboration, and — as evidenced by Venezuela — President Trump must be taken seriously,” the official said.

The spy agency director also repeated the demand from Washington that Cuba stop accommodating adversaries; U.S. officials have long maintained that Moscow and Beijing use the island 90 miles off Florida’s coast to conduct espionage directed against the United States.

Ratcliffe told his Cuban counterparts that Havana “can no longer serve as a platform for adversaries to advance hostile agendas in our hemisphere.”

According to a statement from Havana, Cuba provided information to the U.S. that “made it possible to categorically demonstrate that Cuba does not constitute a threat to U.S. national security, nor are there legitimate reasons to include it on the list of countries that allegedly sponsor terrorism.”

The Trump administration began exploring earlier this year whether the Justice Department could charge members of the regime or the Communist Party with crimes, NBC News had reported. The multi-agency effort was being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida.

Federal prosecutors are actively working on the Castro the case, but it’s not clear whether it has gone before a grand jury, which will determine whether to indict the leader. The possible indictment was first reported by CBS News.

The 1996 shooting of the planes remains one of the most politically-charged episodes in modern U.S.-Cuba relations.

The volunteers routinely flew over the Florida Straits looking for Cuban refugees making their way to the U.S. on makeshift boats.

Fidel Castro, who was president at the time, claimed that the planes violated Cuban airspace and that they were downed as a defense against “terrorist threats.” Raúl Castro was head of the armed forces at the time.

Congress later found the pilots “were flying unarmed and defenseless planes in a mission identical to hundreds they have flown since 1991 and posed no threat whatsoever to the Cuban Government, the Cuban military, or the Cuban people.”

The case has remained a sore point. Cuban American members of Congress wrote a letter to Trump in February asking the Justice Department to consider indicting Raúl Castro in the shooting of the planes.