Trump Live Updates: U.S. Indicts Raúl Castro, Former Cuban President, on Murder Charges – The New York Times

The charges, which were built on an earlier case first filed in 2003, brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the powers of the American criminal justice system at a moment of high tension with Cuba and saddled him with a maximum penalty of life in prison.

They also laid the grounds for potential action by the military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.

The superseding indictment was secretly returned last month and was announced at a news conference in Miami by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

They accused Mr. Castro and the others, including former Cuban pilots, of killing four people who died when the Cuban military shot down two planes in 1996 run by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that used aircraft to look for Cubans fleeing the country by sea. Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were shot down, claiming that the organization had dropped anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights.

“My message today is clear,” Mr. Blanche said. “The United States and President Trump does not — and will not — forget its citizens.”

Echoing that theme, Mr. Quiñones said that Cuba’s Communist government had acted with impunity for decades, but that the indictment would finally hold some of its leaders accountable.

“Those who kill Americans,” he said, “cannot simply wait out American justice.”

When asked by reporters if the indictment was a prelude to U.S. military action in Cuba, Mr. Blanche said that decision was up to Mr. Trump and his foreign policy team.

In the 30 years since the planes were downed, Cuban American lawmakers, exile activists, survivors of the episode and family members of the victims have called for Raúl Castro, who was the minister of defense at the time, to be criminally charged. But Mr. Blanche had little to say when asked by reporters why an indictment in the case was returned now.

“Believe me, the thing which is most true is that for 30 years that has elapsed since then, the delay in justice has been the biggest injustice that has taken place,” José Basulto, who ran Brothers to the Rescue, said in an interview this year.

Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, told The New York Times on Wednesday that the charges against Raúl Castro were an attempt by the Trump administration to create a pretext for military action against Cuba.

“I cannot call it another word than a circus — a circus they are now mounting as one more action to justify military aggression against Cuba,” Mr. Guzmán said in an interview.

He added that Brothers to the Rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times before the Cuban military shot down its planes, and that Cuban officials had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. authorities to stop the group’s flights over Cuba, including in a letter from Fidel Castro to President Bill Clinton, a point supported by declassified U.S. documents from the time.

“How many deliberate and serious violations of U.S. airspace would any U.S. government allow before taking action?” he asked.

While the investigation into Mr. Castro had been going on for weeks, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Quiñones chose to unseal the charges on Wednesday. It coincided with Cuban Independence Day, commemorating the end of the U.S. military occupation of the island in 1902.

The indictment of Mr. Castro came at a moment of rising crisis for Cuba as the country’s oil supplies for domestic use and power plants have been exhausted. It also followed an unusual visit by John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, who met with senior Cuban officials, including Mr. Castro’s grandson, about a week ago. In the talks, he warned the government that it had to make economic changes and stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts on its soil.

Jack Nicas contributed reporting.

The crisis worsened considerably this year when President Trump cut off much-needed oil shipments from Venezuela, after U.S. forces removed that country’s president and took control of its oil industry. Mr. Trump also imposed an effective blockade on fuel shipments to Cuba from any country.

Cuba ran out of jet fuel, and airlines canceled flights. Transportation has largely come to a standstill as black-market gas prices have risen.

Last week, the Cuban government said the country had run out of oil reserves. Its officials have lashed out at the United States, saying it has deliberately inflicted pain on Cuba and violated its sovereignty by blocking oil shipments.

Cuba produces oil domestically, but far less than what it needs to function. As a result, even Havana, the capital, has been experiencing blackouts that can last 24 hours.

Residents interviewed in Havana last weekend said people had resorted to banging pots and pans to protest the blackouts. That tactic, they said, usually resulted in power being restored — proving, in their view, that the government could control which neighborhoods got power and when.

People described a daily quest for food, since it was impossible to run a refrigerator long enough to freeze meat or keep food fresh. They described buying food in small, affordable daily increments: five eggs one day, a pound of pork the next, three pounds of chicken on the day after that.

On a recent Monday, the power was on for just one hour, said a woman who lives in Havana and who did not want her name published, fearing retribution from the police. Things were a little better the next day: The power stayed on for two hours.

Yet, Mr. Rubio talks about dismantling the Communist government with the same passion that galvanizes many political exiles who left the island after the revolution. The indictment of the Raúl Castro, 94, the patriarch of the family, is in line with Mr. Rubio’s enduring mission, and it is just the latest in a series of efforts by the U.S. government to weaken Havana that Mr. Rubio has supported or engineered.

“President Trump is offering a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba,” Mr. Rubio said in a brief video address on Wednesday that was directed at the Cuban people.

“The reason you are forced to survive 22 hours a day without electricity is not due to an oil blockade by the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said in Spanish. “The real reason you don’t have electricity, fuel or food is because those who control your country have plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people.”

Within Mr. Trump’s cabinet, Mr. Rubio’s focus on Cuba stands out, but it is par for course in the Cuban American milieu of South Florida. There, fiery anti-Communist politics are the norm, and casual banter can revolve around the ways in which the United States might one day oust the leaders in Havana.

“Rubio emerges out of the anti-Cuban politics of Miami,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times last December.

Mr. Rhodes managed Mr. Obama’s policy of trying to restore, to a degree, U.S. economic and diplomatic ties with Cuba. Mr. Rhodes discussed the policy at the time with Mr. Rubio, who was a U.S. senator representing Florida.

“He’s always been rooted in a regime-change policy toward Havana,” Mr. Rhodes said. “It’s core to his identity.”

Mr. Rubio was one of the architects of the Trump administration’s military campaign against Venezuela, which resulted in U.S. forces seizing Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, and bringing him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. In 2020, the Justice Department got a grand jury indictment against Mr. Maduro.

The aggression against Venezuela was in part aimed at knocking down the pillars of Cuba’s Communist government. Venezuela was the main supplier of oil for Cuba, and the Trump administration has pressured the country’s new ruler, Delcy Rodríguez, an ally of Mr. Maduro, to halt shipments to the island. As a result, Cuba’s economy has come under greater strain than it has seen in decades.

In 2019, during the first Trump administration’s efforts to unseat Mr. Maduro by trying to encourage an uprising, Mr. Rubio told NPR that a weakened Cuba would be a welcome “byproduct” of a change in Venezuela’s government, even if it were not “the central rationale” for pushing out Mr. Maduro. “Anything that’s bad for a Communist dictatorship is something I support,” he said.

Months ago, Mr. Rubio began speaking directly with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of Raúl Castro, to try to negotiate an economic opening with Cuba that would include some political concessions. U.S. officials were pushing in early March for the Castro family to remove President Miguel Díaz-Canel, which would allow the Trump administration to argue it had successfully engineered political change in Cuba, The New York Times reported.

At the time, U.S. officials were willing to tolerate the Castros staying in power behind the scenes as long as they agreed to guide the country through economic changes pushed by the Trump administration. But U.S. officials have grown impatient with the slow pace of negotiations and what they see as stubbornness on the part of the Castro family.

In the letters, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that he had “directed a review” of U.S.P.S.T.F. appointments “to ensure clarity, continuity, and confidence in the Department’s exercise of its appointment and supervisory responsibilities, and to protect the integrity of the Task Force’s work.” He goes on to say that Dr. Wong’s and Dr. Davis’s appointments are terminated “effective immediately” in order to “avoid uncertainty that could jeopardize the validity of future Task Force actions.”

The task force assesses scientific evidence and makes recommendations on a wide range of medical services, including mammograms, colonoscopies, depression screenings and more. Under the Affordable Care Act, most insurance plans must fully cover services that it assigns an “A” or “B” grade. That gives the panel significant influence over the care Americans can afford.

The letters say the terminations are not related to the leaders’ performance and that they are free to reapply for positions on the task force.

In response to a request for comment, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, referred to the letters. Dr. Wong and Dr. Davis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Public health experts have been worried for much of the past year that Mr. Kennedy would summarily remove members of the task force as he did last year with a panel that reviews vaccines.

Aaron Carroll, the president of AcademyHealth, a nonpartisan group that promotes evidence-based health policy and previously urged Mr. Kennedy not to interfere with U.S.P.S.T.F., said the task force’s credibility depended on “transparent and rigorous procedures” both for appointing members and for evaluating evidence.

By firing its leaders before their terms had ended, the Trump administration is “tampering with the critical infrastructure” that makes it possible for Americans to trust government health care systems, Dr. Carroll said.

Last month, Mr. Kennedy said he planned to reform the panel, which he called “lackadaisical and negligent.” Over the past year, Mr. Kennedy has undermined the task force’s work by indefinitely postponing its last three meetings and not replacing members whose terms were scheduled to end in December.

The committee issued fewer recommendations last year because it was unable to meet, and it did not publish a legally mandated annual report to Congress on gaps in scientific evidence — a report that helps guide what research the federal government funds.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.

In a statement on Wednesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said that Beijing had agreed to buy 200 Boeing planes, a transaction that would mark the largest single Chinese purchase of the American manufacturer’s aircraft in nearly a decade. The ministry also confirmed that Beijing had approved American slaughterhouses to resume exporting beef to China, giving a green light to more than 600 U.S. companies after an initially muddled notice last week.

The announcements came in a online posting by the Ministry of Commerce five days after the two leaders’ meeting in Beijing. Mr. Trump and other American officials have since hailed the summit’s success and the commercial commitments secured from Beijing.

But critical points of friction remained unresolved, particularly over tariffs. Mr. Trump, for his part, told reporters afterward: “We didn’t discuss tariffs.”

On Wednesday, China’s commerce ministry pushed back on that account, saying the U.S. and China had “engaged in in-depth discussions on tariffs” during the latest negotiations. The ministry added that it hoped Washington would “honor its commitments” and ensure that U.S. tariff levels on Chinese goods would “not exceed the level stipulated” during talks last fall in South Korea, when the two sides had agreed to a tariff truce.

It was the second time a Chinese official said tariffs were discussed during last week’s talks, a sign that Beijing may be laying the groundwork for retaliation in the future, said Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group.

“It reflects a base line for China that tariffs cannot go up,” Ms. Wang said. “Trump tried to downplay it. China will likely retaliate if tariffs do go up.”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed to a yearlong truce in October that left tariffs on Chinese goods at 30 percent. But in February, those tariffs, along with Mr. Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs on other countries, were struck down after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal. The White House responded by imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports under a temporary trade clause known as Section 122.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has since said the administration plans to revive the tariffs through investigations into forced labor and industrial overcapacity under Section 301, another trade provision. Experts have argued that the investigations are directed at China.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has preferred to emphasize the handful of trade wins.

Boeing, in particular, has long sought to regain its footing in the Chinese market, and Kelly Ortberg, the company’s chief executive, was among the American business leaders who accompanied Mr. Trump to Beijing. Nearly one in seven commercial planes in operation today flies in China.

But Boeing’s relationship with Beijing deteriorated after the worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX aircraft following two crashes less than five months apart that killed a total of 346 people. In 2020, citing the coronavirus pandemic, China canceled an outstanding order for 29 of the jets.

Boeing resumed deliveries to China in 2024, but those shipments stalled last year as Mr. Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods.

It remains unclear which aircraft models Beijing has agreed to purchase.

Mr. Trump and Boeing have said that Beijing would reopen its market to the American aerospace company. But Chinese officials initially avoided comment.

That changed on Wednesday. “Aviation is a key area for deepening mutually beneficial cooperation between China and the United States,” the commerce ministry said in its statement.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump said that China had agreed to purchase “approximately 400, 450 engines, 200 planes and a promise of up to 750 if they do a good job.”

It also remains unclear how much American beef China will ultimately buy after reinstating the registration of U.S. beef suppliers.

In the end, Beijing granted licenses to 690 American companies, after a confusing turn of events that briefly seemed as though official had reversed course and approved about 200.

Still, the restoration of the U.S. beef trade may prove more symbolic than substantial. Beijing has been trying to shield domestic cattle farmers from a flood of imported meat.

Murphy Zhao contributed reporting, Ruoxin Zhang and Li You contributed research.