The former Cuban defense minister has many crimes for which he could be tried in the US
14ymedio, Miami, Pedro Corzo, May 31, 2026 / I confess that few things would please me more than seeing Raúl Castro dressed in the orange jumpsuit of ordinary US prisoners, serving his sentence in a more severe prison. Although I doubt that a US prison of that kind would be any harsher than the less malevolent Castro regime’s prisons.
For 67 years, there has been no shortage of Cuba experts who emphatically assert that the younger Castro brother, the more organized, familial, and even condescending, compared to his brother, the greatest criminal in Cuban history, thankfully now deceased. While I have no evidence to refute most of the labels applied to Raúl, I can assure you that he is anything but tolerant, because I vividly recall one of the photos of this man published in early January 1959, showing him hanging a peasant in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the insurrection.
He then ordered hundreds of executions, including the San Juan Hill massacre in Santiago de Cuba, which occurred 11 days after the insurrection’s triumph, in which 71 men were summarily executed in a single night. They even used bulldozers, in true Hitlerian style.
Raúl was without a doubt Fidel’s most loyal servant. It is true that there have been stories of disagreements between the two autocrats, but even if they were true, the pair’s shared interests prevailed, to the great misfortune of the Cuban people.
Unfortunately, the most numerous and horrendous crimes of Castro’s totalitarianism have been against the Cuban people.
Raúl Castro, the serial killer Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the “Butcher of Artemisa,” Ramiro Valdés, chose from the very first days of the revolutionary victory to assume the role of the most intransigent defenders of the process led by Fidel Castro. This bloody triad, headed by the criminal Raúl, was the one that, obeying the orders of the supreme leader, directed the spiritual and material destruction of a country that, with all its flaws, was at the forefront of many of the most important areas of development in Latin America.
I confess I haven’t the faintest idea how the trial will unfold against the man who gave the order to shoot down two unarmed planes flying in international waters, with the sole objective of saving lives in danger. The former Cuban Minister of Defense said, “I said, well, shoot them down in the sea when they appear and don’t ask questions,” a statement very similar to Guevara’s, who advised his henchmen, “Kill him, ask questions later,” or another, more institutional one, from the serial killer: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.” Of Ramiro Valdés, there are no expressions, only murders.
Unfortunately, the most numerous and horrendous crimes of Castro’s totalitarian regime have been committed against the Cuban people within the country’s borders, but those crimes will have to be judged by their own citizens when the political situation in Cuba changes. For now, we must welcome the fact that the current US government has decided to take legal action against a self-confessed murderer like Raúl Castro, just as it did against the drug trafficker Nicolás Maduro, for a crime that could also be attributed to the second-in-command in the destruction of Cuba.
Raul Castro has many crimes for which he can be tried in the United States
According to a Miami Herald article, Raúl Castro met with Colombian drug traffickers in 1980 and authorized them to use Cuban ports for their drug trafficking to the US, in exchange for providing weapons and ammunition to the M-19 guerrillas. Years later, he met with one of Manuel Antonio Noriega’s men to mediate a dispute the Panamanian general was having with Colombian drug traffickers.
Manuel de Beunza, a former major in the Castro regime’s intelligence services, testified at a Senate hearing in Washington that Raúl Castro ordered Generoso Escudero replaced as head of the naval unit in Cienfuegos because he refused to cooperate in the deployment of speedboats transporting cocaine to the southern coast of Cuba. Furthermore, John Jairo “Popeye” Velásquez, a close associate of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, stated that the fugitive general maintained close ties with the Medellín cocaine cartel and protected drug shipments passing through Cuba en route to the southern coast of Florida.
Raul Castro has many crimes for which he can be tried by the United States.
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