Cuban pilot Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez was sentenced to seven months in prison after admitting he lied on immigration forms
EFE/14ymedio, Miami, May 28, 2026 — Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, a Cuban pilot who was indicted last week alongside former president Raúl Castro for the shootdown of two planes belonging to the organization Brothers to the Rescue, was sentenced this Thursday to seven months in prison in the United States for lying on immigration forms. The sentence comes one week after the defendant, who entered U.S. territory under humanitarian parole, admitted guilt to fraud in obtaining a visa.
The man was already being held in a state prison, so he is expected to be released before that term is completed.
González-Pardo Rodríguez is one of the five military officers whom the U.S. Department of Justice indicted last week, together with Castro, for the deaths of four people — three U.S. citizens and one legal resident, all of Cuban origin — in the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. The other military officers are Emilio José Palacio Blanco, José Fidel Gual Barzaga, Raúl Simanca Cárdenas, and Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez. The indictment includes four counts of murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, and destruction of aircraft.
The U.S. government has not detailed what the next steps might be in the prosecution of Raúl Castro
Unlike González-Pardo Rodríguez, who was already in the United States at the time of the indictment, Castro, 94, remains in Cuba, and the U.S. government has not detailed what the next steps in his prosecution might be.
During the announcement of the indictment last week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that the former Cuban president would appear before justice “of his own will or by some other means,” though he avoided answering whether Washington was planning an operation in Cuba similar to the one carried out in Venezuela on January 3 to capture then-ruler Nicolás Maduro.
According to Cuba, the attack under scrutiny in this case took place in Cuba’s territorial waters, in legitimate defense and after more than a dozen warnings, and therefore did not violate international law. However, reports from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States, established that the aircraft were shot down in international airspace.
Brothers to the Rescue was a nonprofit organization founded in Miami by José Basulto in the early 1990s. Its members patrolled international waters searching for Cuban rafters attempting to flee the Island, while Havana accused them of violating Cuban airspace and carrying out political provocations.
Subsequent investigations revealed that at least two Cuban agents infiltrated into Brothers to the Rescue provided detailed information about flight routes and schedules to the Cuban government, facilitating the regime’s military operation. In 2003, a U.S. federal court charged a Cuban general and two fighter pilots over the shootdown, but no formal charges were brought at that time against the Castro brothers.
In June 1996, El Nuevo Herald published an audio recording in which Raúl Castro can be heard saying: “I said they should try to shoot them down over the territory, but they entered Havana and left again… Of course, with one of those air-to-air missiles, what comes down is a fireball, and it’s going to fall on the city. Well, shoot them down at sea when they show up.” In the same audio document, the then-head of the Armed Forces speaks of giving “authority” to “five generals.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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