5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Opinion
The Indictment of Raúl Castro: A New Low in US Cuba Policy
This new indictment is simply a cynical escalation in the long US effort to force regime change in Cuba.
May 21, 2026
So apparently the Trump administration has decided that what Cuba really needs right now—after decades of economic strangulation, CIA assassination attempts, sabotage campaigns, invasions, sanctions, blackouts, shortages, and more than half a century of failed regime-change policy—is the indictment of 94-year-old revolutionary icon Raúl Castro.
The United States and Cuba do not have to be enemies. In fact, just 10 years ago, the two countries were normalizing relations. I was in Panama City at the 2015 Summit of the Americas when, to the delight of everyone there, former US President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro famously shook hands, marking the first substantial public interaction between leaders of the two countries in decades. Obama said, “The United States is not interested in being prisoners of the past,” while Raúl Castro thanked Obama for taking steps toward normalization and called him “an honest man.” The opening was a win-win for both countries: an influx of US tourists, a flourishing of private businesses, and new openings for civil society. Then came Donald Trump, who sent relations spiraling downward once again.
Fast forward to today, with the indictment of Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that left four men dead. I was in Cuba at the time leading a group of US CEOs interested in investing on the island. The next day, we were supposed to meet with Fidel Castro. But after the planes were shot down, the meeting was canceled and the business executives rushed to take the next flight back to Miami.
It was a tragic and regrettable incident—not only because of the lives lost, but also because it hardened political attitudes toward Cuba for years to come, paving the way for the codification of the US blockade into law.
Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.
But it’s critical to understand the context.
The group’s leader, José Basulto, was a veteran of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion with a long history of anti-Cuban militancy. He openly admitted, “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States.” The group repeatedly violated Cuban airspace and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. Basulto himself declared after one such mission: “We want confrontation.” Between 1994 and February 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cuban civil aviation authorities documented more than 25 serious and systematic violations of Cuban airspace by aircraft associated with Brothers to the Rescue.
The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and international aviation authorities that these flights were illegal and dangerous. US officials knew the risks. The National Security Archive’s declassified records, published on May 19, 2026, reveal that high-level US officials understood that continued Cuban airspace violations could lead to disaster. An FAA email from January 22, 1996—one month before the shootdown—explicitly warned of the “worst case scenario” that “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.” The same document acknowledged that State Department officials understood the overflights could “only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government.”
On February 23, 1996, White House Cuba adviser Richard Nuccio warned National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that “tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba… that we fear this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the plane.” Yet the FAA refused Nuccio’s request to ground the flights.
While there is disagreement over whether the planes were ultimately shot down in Cuban or international airspace, the pilots had reportedly filed a false flight plan and again approached Cuban airspace despite direct warnings from Cuban controllers.
The hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro nearly 30 years later is staggering, given the long history of anti-Cuban extremists operating from US soil to wreak havoc against the island with bombings, sabotage, and airline terrorism. In 1976, terrorists bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people onboard, including the entire Cuban national fencing team. In 1997, a 32-year-old Italian tourist was killed in a hotel bombing aimed at destroying Cuba’s tourism industry. Yet men implicated in these horrific acts, including Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, were protected by US authorities and allowed to live freely in Miami.
And let’s remember: The same US government now pursuing charges against Raúl Castro has itself been carrying out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, strikes that have killed at least 193 people since September 2025, with no transparency or due process.
This new indictment is simply a cynical escalation in the long US effort to force regime change in Cuba. Will Washington try to use it as a pretext to invade the island and “extract” Raúl Castro, as it did with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela? Will it once again send US troops to occupy Cuba, as it did in 1898, 1906, and 1912? Will it ignite a civil war? We have no idea.
But we do know this: Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.
Raúl Castro is 94 years old. Let him live out his final years in the country where he was born and for which he fought his entire life. Instead of tightening the blockade and pushing Cuba toward greater poverty, instability, migration, and despair, the United States should finally abandon its failed policy of domination, lift the sanctions, and allow Cubans—not Washington politicians or Miami hardliners—to decide Cuba’s future.
Keep Reading
Show Less
A Gas Tax Holiday Won’t Lower Energy Prices. Here’s What Would
As the war with Iran has so glaringly proven, the assertions by Trump and his fellow Republicans about consumer cost benefits of American “energy independence” are a complete sham. But there are real solutions available.
May 21, 2026
With the traditional summer driving season rapidly approaching, gasoline prices in the US—already grossly inflated by President Trump’s ongoing conflict of confusion with Iran—are likely to spike even higher. As of mid-May, the average price at the pump has reached $4.52 a gallon—a 54 percent increase over the pre-war cost. By Memorial Day the average American could be paying more than $5 a gallon—an unthinkable reality just a few months ago.
But how could this be? After all, Trump has claimed for years that a “drill, baby, drill” approach to domestic energy policy, heedlessly advancing the interests of Big Oil, would surely benefit everyday Americans with lower energy costs. What Trump’s foreign and domestic escapades have produced instead was likely his actual intended outcome all along: massive profits for fossil fuel corporations and their executives that helped get him elected. We should be shocked but not surprised that these dirty favors are now being repaid on an unconscionable scale, all at our expense.
As the war with Iran has so glaringly proven, the assertions by Trump and his fellow Republicans about consumer cost benefits of American “energy independence” are a complete sham. There is a remarkably straightforward explanation for this: Domestic oil and gas prices are set by the global marketplace. Our constant interaction with this marketplace, through voluminous oil and gas exporting and importing, makes the US vulnerable to any disruptive occurrence around the world. Increased domestic production does not generally translate to lower energy prices for Americans.
There are key steps that Congress can take right now to substantively reduce fuel costs for US consumers immediately. All they require is the political will to stand up for everyday Americans by standing up to Big Oil.
In recent days Trump has bizarrely claimed that he “doesn’t think at all” about Americans’ financial pain, but has also suggested suspending the federal gasoline tax to provide relief for drivers. This is highly unlikely to make much difference, as little of the modest 18-cent tax would actually be passed down through the supply chain to savings at the pump.
Yet there are key steps that Congress can take right now to substantively reduce fuel costs for US consumers immediately. All they require is the political will to stand up for everyday Americans by standing up to Big Oil.
First, Congress should halt gasoline exports when domestic prices spike. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would do just this. This simple policy is a no-brainer. A temporary halt on gasoline exports would provide effective insulation from moments of international market turmoil by suddenly bolstering domestic supply and quickly relieving stress on prices at the pump here at home.
The second bill Congress should pass now to help struggling American families is the Windfall Profits Tax—a special levy on the very largest fossil fuel companies. Sponsored by Khanna in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in the Senate, the bill would impose a supplemental quarterly levy based on the difference between “normal” (but still massive) corporate oil profits made last year versus the absolutely mind-blowing profits raked in since price spikes in 2026. Revenue collected would be returned directly back to taxpayers.
Egregious profiteering aside, Americans shouldn’t be asked to subsidize dirty, climate-killing fossil fuels in the first place.
The Windfall Profits Tax would only fall on the very largest fossil fuel corporations, leaving smaller companies accounting for 70 percent of domestic production untouched. This approach would prevent giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron from further gouging consumers without the very real threat of losing significant market share. With oil priced over $100 a barrel, as it is now, the tax would raise at least $33 billion annually. An average American family would receive at least $325 of this pot. Again, the only loser here: the very biggest of Big Oil.
Egregious profiteering aside, Americans shouldn’t be asked to subsidize dirty, climate-killing fossil fuels in the first place. Congress must act on this absurdity as well, via the End Polluter Welfare Act. First introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2012, the bill has been updated over the years to keep up with the ever-expanding amount of taxpayer aid foolishly funneled to one of the richest—and most hazardous—industries in the world. Trump’s disastrous “Big, Beautiful Bill” of 2025 only doubled down on the madness.
Sanders’ bill would eliminate more than $190 billion in tax loopholes and federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over the next 10 years. A reinvestment of this huge sum in countless other ways, for countless other purposes, would have a direct and lasting positive impact on Americans’ financial and physical health.
As President Trump continues to address the deepening energy cost crisis in America with an oscillating assortment of meaningless platitudes, false promises, and outright dismissiveness, Congress has an opportunity to step up and advance real, tangible solutions that would help families and small businesses. The legislative tools to address the crisis are sitting on the shelf, waiting for the political will to pull them down, dust them off, and put them to work.
Keep Reading
Show Less
When Trump Targets the Media, the World's Autocrats Are Taking Notes
Trump's words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.
May 21, 2026
Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.
In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.
At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.
Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.
Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.
Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.
Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.
Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.
Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.
While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.
Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.
Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.
At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.
Keep Reading
Show Less
To Defeat Trump, Be Mindful of the Anti-Democratic Tradition He Sprung From
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic.
May 21, 2026
The notion that the US is an empire in decline has been a recurring theme in international relations literature since the 1980s. Surely, the United States remains the dominant force in the world economy, but it faces daunting challenges from the emergence of China as an economic superpower. And there is no denying the fact that while the US is a military superpower, with the highest defense budget in the world and possessing a range of weapons that other major powers simply do not have, its influence over global politics has been getting weaker. It can bully a country like Venezuela into submission and strangle Cuba to death as part of a strategy of selective hegemony under Trump 2.0, but cannot shape political outcomes across Latin America; holds no monopoly over diplomacy in the Middle East; cannot dictate policy to Europe; cannot force Russia to end the war in Ukraine; and surely lacks the political and economic leverage to contain and isolate China.
Last week’s Trump-Xi summit drove home the reality of shifts in global power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made US President Donald Trump look weak. Not only did “philosopher-king” Xi concede nothing to the American wannabe emperor but made a subtle threat to the US by invoking the Thucydides trap. In so doing, Xi was letting Trump know that China’s rise is real and that, as such, the world has once again come to a new crossroads. Subsequently, the US should be careful how it handles the new reality of a world no longer dominated by Washington; a strategic miscalculation on its part over Taiwan (the reddest of red lines for China) could lead to war.
Nonetheless, while the debate continues to rage over whether US global hegemony is in decline or not, there should be much less doubt about domestic decline. The over-extension of the empire, characterized by forever wars and endless aggression, an enormously bloated Pentagon budget, and roughly 800 military bases in over 80 countries, has imposed severe pressures on the domestic economy and led to the worsening of social conditions and the unraveling of civil society. The economy has been facing unsustainable economic imbalances (deficits in its fiscal and current account balances) since the late 1990s, and the national debt now exceeds the country’s GDP. In the meantime, the problems of the country as a whole are mounting: crumbling infrastructure, decaying cities, disintegrated education, an unaffordable healthcare system, and a housing crisis that has reached a breaking point make the US resemble a third world country. And the rich are getting richer every day while wages have remained stagnant for most US workers since the late 1970s.
As if this wasn’t bad enough for what is still the wealthiest country in the world, economic alienation and racism are tearing the social fabric apart, thereby offering more opportunities to extend the police operations of the imperial state to the domestic realm as well—increasing the size of the police and building more prisons, as mass incarceration is indeed “big business” in the United States.
Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society.
The rise of Donald Trump to power is a symptom of the decline of the US as a world power and as an advanced industrial society. It is in that context that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan captured the imagination of a large segment of the population, reflecting a desire for a return to some idealized state of American society. But it wasn’t simply economics that drove so many to Trump’s arms. The MAGA movement is dependent on racial resentment and straight-up racism. “Make America Great Again” is a politico-cultural project, not some blueprint for economic restructuring.
Many of followers of the MAGA movement professed an aversion to US imperial ambitions and believed that the system is somehow rigged, although they never explained in whose favor. But like traditional conservatives before them, they opposed the federal government not only because they saw it as an instrument of a globalized elite but because they oppose the expansion of federal programs. Their real frustration was over the direction in which the country was moving socially and culturally, which they felt had major ramifications for the economic status of white Americans. This made them perfect prey for Trump’s demagoguery.
Trump himself did identify some of the real economic problems facing the United States, such as decades of manufacturing decline and a growing trade deficit, and spoke from very early on of a collapsing infrastructure that made the US resemble a third world country. But it’s not just that Trump’s actual diagnosis of the structural problems facing the United States is wrong and that the remedies pursued by his administration (sweeping tariffs and mass deportations) are incoherent and designed to backfire. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, enforce a plutocratic agenda, roll back decades of social progress, and get revenge on his political opponents any way that he can.
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic. From the 20th century onward, the enemy for the political tradition that Trump and his billionaire allies stand for is equality, social welfare, and redistribution. It was so for the era of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and remains so for today’s reactionaries. As Project 2025 perfectly epitomizes, which the Trump administration has been enforcing with great dedication, the enemy is a society that seeks to place the interests of working people ahead of greed, profit making, and the unlimited accumulation of capital by striving to create institutions that strengthen the public good and enforce democratic accountability.
What we have with Trump and the MAGA movement is an updated version of Social Darwinism, a foundational pillar of fascism. Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society. For decent people everywhere, it can be said that the greatest of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. For Trump and his ilk, it can be judged by raising plutocratic power to new heights and inflicting as much pain as possible on the poor and the weak. In this manner, the Trump administration’s politics of cruelty and the callousness of its approach to social policy go beyond simply serving the interests of capitalism as they are designed to produce systemic fear and turn brutality into a source of pleasure. Part of the aim is to make the public numb and apathetic to the astonishing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and how it corrupts politics and the media.
How Trumpism ends is anyone’s guess. But while it must be defeated if there is to be a future hope for the United States, it must also be understood that a major part of the nation’s history is intrinsically linked to the anti-democratic tradition that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to power. How to uproot it is of vital importance for the realization of a good and just society.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular