grandson

MIAMI — Federal prosecutors on Wednesday announced charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro in the 1996 downing of civilian planes operated by Miami-based exiles as the Trump administration escalated pressure on the socialist government.

The indictment was related to Castro’s alleged role in the shootdown of two small planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Castro, now 94, was Cuba’s defense minister at the time. The charges included murder and destruction of an airplane.

Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and other top Justice Department officials made the announcement in Miami at a ceremony to honor those killed in the shootdown.

President Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since U.S. forces captured the Cuban government’s longtime patron, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After ousting Maduro, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.

Since Maduro’s capture, Trump has ratcheted up talk of regime change in Cuba after pledging earlier this year to conduct a “friendly takeover” of the country if its leadership did not open its economy to American investment and kick out U.S. adversaries.

Trump’s first administration indicted Maduro on drug-trafficking charges and used that to justify removing him from power during a surprise military raid in January that whisked the Venezuelan leader to New York to face trial.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday urged the Cuban people to demand a free-market economy with new leadership that he said will chart a new course in relations with the U.S.

“In the U.S., we are ready to open a new chapter in the relationship between our people,” Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said in a Spanish-language video message. “Currently, the only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.”

Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos F. de Cossío lashed out at Rubio on X, saying he “lies so repeatedly and unscrupulously about Cuba and tries to justify the aggression he inflicts on the Cuban people.” Rubio “knows full well that there is no excuse for such cruel and ruthless aggression.”

Raúl Castro believed to wield power behind the scenes

There’s no indication Castro will be taken into U.S. custody anytime soon.

He took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel Castro in 2006 before handing power to a trusted loyalist, Díaz-Canel, in 2018.

While he retired in 2021 as head of the Cuban Communist Party, he is widely believed to wield power behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, who previously met secretly with Rubio.

Last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana for meetings with Cuban officials, including Castro’s grandson. Two other senior State Department officials met with the grandson in April.

“The symbolic nature is absolutely crucial,” said Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, a former prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami who handled national security cases and crimes involving Cubans.

“Even though Raúl Castro will likely stay and die in Cuba, you can use the indictment as a pressure point, a tactical advantage, to extract other concessions like the release of prisoners or to keep Russia out,” she added.

The investigation into Castro stretches back to the 1990s

Starting in 1995, planes flown by members of Brothers to the Rescue, a group founded by Cuban exiles, buzzed over Havana dropping leaflets urging Cubans to rise up against the Castro government.

The Cubans protested to the U.S. government, warning that they would defend their airspace. Federal Aviation Administration officials also opened an investigation and met with the group’s leaders to urge them to ground the flights, according to declassified government records obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive.

“This latest overflight can only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government,” an FAA official wrote in an email to her superiors after one intrusion in January 1996. “Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.”

But those calls went unheeded and on Feb. 24, 1996, missiles fired by Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets downed two unarmed civilian Cessna planes a short distance north of Havana just beyond Cuba’s airspace. All four men aboard were killed.

Raúl Castro faced earlier indictment

Guy Lewis, who was a federal prosecutor, uncovered evidence linking senior Cuban military officials to cocaine trafficking by Colombia’s Medellin cartel. Following the shootdown, the investigation expanded, and prosecutors pursued charges against Raúl Castro for leading a vast racketeering conspiracy by Cuba’s armed forces.

“The evidence was strong,” Lewis said in an interview.

In the end, the Clinton administration indicted four individuals, including the MiG pilots, the head of the Cuban air force and the head of a Cuban spy network in Miami — the only one to see the inside of a U.S. prison — for providing valuable intelligence about the flights.

The incident led the U.S. to harden its position against Cuba, even though the Cold War had ended and the Castros’ support for revolution across Latin America was a fading memory.

But Castro himself was spared as the Clinton administration — which had quietly sought to expand relations with Cuba prior to the incident — raised foreign policy concerns about such a high-profile indictment.

“Raúl was definitely one who slipped through the noose,” Lewis said. “The crime is notorious. Three U.S. citizens and one legal permanent resident were killed in a premeditated orchestrated murder. That should never be forgotten.”

Goodman and Richer write for the Associated Press. Richer reported from Washington.

As BBC marks what would have been Queen Elizabeth II’s 100th birthday, Peter Phillips says that his grandmother stunned them all in 2012

As the nation remembers Queen Elizabeth II on what would have been her 100th birthday next week, one grandson has given fresh insight into the subterfuge that went into her astonishing James Bond moment from the 2012 Olympics.

Peter Phillips was gripped by the scenes, along with the rest of the nation, in which the monarch comes face to face with Daniel Craig’s 007, before they seemingly parachute into the stadium from a helicopter.

But speaking in a new BBC documentary, Peter says even the family were kept totally in the dark about the extraordinary stunt. “When the clip first started we were like, ‘I wonder who they’ve got playing the Queen?’ And then she turned around. And we were like ‘wow’. It was sheer amazement. That was one of the best-kept secrets, because literally nobody knew.”

READ MORE: ITV reveals last ever outing for cast of 7 Up this year – but some faces will be missingREAD MORE: Iconic 90s TV show returning to Channel 4 for first time since 2015

The tribute film, which airs tomorrow, takes viewers through all the key moments of her reign, with insights provided by leaders, celebrities, experts and loved ones.

Queen Camilla speaks of her deep admiration for her late mother-in-law. Looking back at how she came the first female member of the royal family to join the army full time, when she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, Camilla says: “I think duty has over-ridden everything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody have a sense of duty like she had.”

Ex-US president Barack Obama agreed, commending the late Queen’s “combination of a sense of duty, with a very human quality of kindness and consideration and a sense of humour”. He adds: “I think that’s what made her so beloved, not just in Great Britain but around the world.”

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair also had deep respect for Elizabeth II. “She was not a queen, but the queen,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll see her like again.”

Camilla recalls that celebrating the Queen’s platinum jubilee in February 2022, just as the Covid pandemic finally came to a close, was particularly joyous coming, as it would turn out, just a few months before the Queen’s death.

“I remember there were thousands and thousands of people lining the streets and lining The Mall – we were all looking for something to cheer us all up,” she says. “People hadn’t been out, they’d been stuck in their houses so it was an incredible jubilee. She was very much centre stage, I’ve never seen anything like it. Everybody was in a good mood.”

Helen Mirren, who put in as Oscar-winning performance as Elizabeth II in The Queen, agrees that the monarch’s profound sense of duty came naturally to her and says her death in 2022 left many feeling bereft. “She’d become such an intrinsic part of the tapestry of our life, it was as if you were going to pull a thread and the whole thing was going to fall apart.”

To research the role for the 2006 movie, Helen studied hours of footage, including plenty of when the monarch was a child. She laughs when shown an archive reel of a three-year-old Elizabeth. “I’ve never seen this before, so young! And her hair is almost the same as when she died. That’s incredible.”

Another clip shows Elizabeth aged around 10. “When I played the Queen I watched a particular piece of film over and over again of her getting out of a big black car,” the actress explains. “You see how she steps forwards and does what she knows she’s supposed to do, which is shake hands. She naturally had a sense of self control and duty.”

That innate sense of how to behave was again in evidence when Elizabeth’s father, George VI, died suddenly while she and her new husband Prince Philip were just six days in to a tour of the Commonwealth in 1951. Returning swiftly to Britain, she was filmed smiling and shaking hands with the many top-hatted, male politicians who were on the tarmac to greet her.

“She’s only just been told that her beloved, beloved father has died without her being there,” Helen 80, says. “I think that would have been so devastating to her, that she never had the chance to say goodbye.What you see happening is the duty stepping in, she does exactly what she’s supposed to do.”

Camilla is also astonished to see how calm and composed the young queen looks in this challenging moment, when she is dealing with her own grief. “It must have been so difficult being surrounded by much older men. There weren’t women prime ministers or women presidents, she was the only one. So I think she carved her own role.”

Over the course of her life Elizabeth faced plenty of difficult times, including the marriages of three of her children ending in the same year and the loss of many loved ones.

When her husband of 73 years, the Duke of Edinburgh, died during the pandemic, the Queen refused to break the rules governing the nation and instead broke hearts as she sat at his funeral all alone. Watching the sad clip of his isolated grandmother, Peter Phillips says all he wanted to do at the time was “give her a hug”.

But there were also times when the Queen came in for criticism rather than sympathy, never moreso than after the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when she opted to remain at Balmoral for more than a week rather than return to London.

BBC royal presenter Kirsty Young remembers: “There was tangible anger. Whether it was the flag being brought down to half mast or the Queen making a statement, these things were not happening. There was radio silence. There was a sense in which people might almost storm the gates of the palace.”

But the Queen then turned public opinion around with her heartfelt TV broadcast to the nation. Describing the former monarch as “quietly radical”, Kirsty adds: “I think the address by the Queen after the death of Diana illustrated beautifully that she had an ear to the public and that she was willing to do things that had never been done before.”

Blair agrees it was one of the Queen’s most challenging moments. “We had a series of really intense conversations where the Queen was having to balance the impact on her family, on her grandchildren, with the need to respond to what was a national mood at the time. Her genius was, in a way, to steer the monarchy through all of that whilst not really changing much herself.”

For her part, actress Helen believes the Queen was absolutely right to stay with her grandsons after the devastating loss of their mother. “I think she was right to stay in Balmoral with the children and then when she came out and did the very difficult walk with the flowers and everything, that was the right thing to do.”

Born just a couple of weeks after the Queen, Sir David Attenborough was running the BBC at one point in the late 1960s when it was decided the royals needed to become more relatable. This led to the BBC documentary Royal Family, an early example of reality TV, where they let the cameras in. “There was a feeling that the royal family was getting a bit remote and I remember the discussions we had in the BBC, that the image of the family should be softened in some way,” Sir David explains. It was huge hit with more than 30million UK viewers tuning in – but afterwards the Queen regretted her decision to display their private lives. The series has not been shown since the 1970s, with Elizabeth ordering it was locked away in the royal archives.

But tonight viewers can see rare clips from the series, showing a relaxed Philip cooking sausages and the queen laughing and joking with her children.

– Queen Elizabeth II: Her Story, Our Century, BBC1, 9pm, Sunday