Condemning Castro's Cuba to History's Dustbin

Austin Bay on May 27, 2026

On May 26, during a Fox News television interview, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla called U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio a liar.

Rodriguez argued Rubio falsely accuses Cuba of being a threat to the U.S. Rubio spins a deceitful narrative designed to justify a U.S. military assault on harmless Cuba.

Rodriguez suggested the recent indictment of former Cuban President Raul Castro is part of the propaganda plot. For the record, Raul is the younger brother of now-deceased Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro. Fidel died in 2016.

Last week (May 20), the U.S. Department of Justice announced a federal grand jury had indicted Raul on an array of serious charges, including conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals and four counts of murder.

On February 24, 1996, Raul (then minister of defense) ordered Cuban MiG jet fighters to shoot down two unarmed civilian Cessna prop planes belonging to the Cuban exile organization Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR).

The four men in BTTR's Cessnas were scouting for Cuban refugees attempting to escape the island on rafts or small boats.

Armed with air-to-air missiles, the MiGs attacked over international waters. The missiles blew the Cessnas out of the sky. All four BTTR searchers died, three U.S. citizens and one U.S. resident.

According to the Miami Herald, DOJ prosecutors have evidence indicating the aerial attack was an ambush planned and coordinated by Cuba's Intelligence Directorate. The spectacular ambush would help achieve one of the Castro regime's major political goals: intimidate and frighten the Cuban exile community in the U.S.

So, you can pin it on the regime's biggest names. On May 20, the Miami Herald reported the indictment "states that all orders flowed through the Cuban military hierarchy with Raul Castro and Fidel Castro 'as the final decision makers ...'"

Alas, in his Fox interview, Comrade Rodriguez dismissed the indictment as "a violation of international law" and part of a political propaganda campaign.

"Why did it take 30 years to do this (i.e., indict Raul)?" Rodriguez asked his interviewer. "... What is the ethical value? What is the legal value behind these allegations right now? Or is this part of the political narrative aimed at manipulating the U.S. public opinion to justify military aggression against Cuba?"

Yes. A Communist dictatorship's foreign minister slickly invokes ethical and legal values as reasons to impeach the legitimacy of murder charges and an unprovoked military attack on civilian aircraft in international air space.

The Miami Herald May 20 article I quoted earlier provides Rodriguez with a potent and compelling answer.

The paper asked a former federal attorney, Bob Martinez, to assess the indictment. Martinez has exceptional expertise. As a civilian lawyer, Martinez "won a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of the (murdered) men's relatives against the government of Cuba."

Martinez told the Herald: "The glee from the pilots and the military tower after each destruction that pulverized the men and their aircraft just puts an exclamation point on their depravity." (A transcript exists of the pilots and tower gloating by radio after the ambush.) "Referring to Fidel Castro's well-known phrase, 'history will absolve me,' Martinez added 'history will condemn Fidel, Raul and their family dictatorship into the dustbin of history.'"

I suspect the condemnation of history is an American goal Comrade Rodriguez, the current regime and Raul Castro have considered but still think they can evade.

That will be difficult. Fidel seized power in 1959. Sixty-seven years of Communist rule in Cuba failed to create the workers' paradise Fidel, Raul and their Marx-touting comrades promised. Throughout the Cold War, Fidel reveled in his role as a thorn in the side of U.S. foreign policy. His regime provided Cuban troops to Soviet Union-inspired "Third World struggles for liberation" -- particularly in Africa and the Western Hemisphere. The Castro brothers touted Moscow as "the natural ally" of the Third World.

In the 1990s the Castros sent waves of refugees into the U.S. - possibly an early experiment in using mass immigration to politically and economically stymie an adversary state.

Today, the power grid fails and Cuban people starve in darkness. But the regime continues to provide Moscow and Beijing with an intelligence-gathering base -- and potential drone launch site -- 90 miles from the U.S. mainland.

Historians, pay attention. Trying Raul for murder puts Cuban communism on trial -- for the murder of four Americans and for the murder of Cuba.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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