Havana (AFP) – A former Cuban spy who infiltrated a group of Florida anti-communist exiles in the 1990s told AFP that Havana’s fatal shootdown of two planes piloted by the activists set the stage for devastating US sanctions. The stated mission of Brothers to the Rescue was assisting Cubans trying to sail to Florida, often in barely seaworthy vessels, but the Miami-based group also had ulterior goals, Rene Gonzalez said in an interview Wednesday at his home in Havana.
“Hidden behind the humanitarian idea of saving lives, there was a series of schemes that were not made public,” Gonzalez said, describing weapons tests and plans to attack the Cuban electrical grid. On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot down two small aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue, killing four members of the group that worked to oppose revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. The United States condemned the downing, and then-president Bill Clinton signed a tough new law called the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened sanctions against Cuba. It is still the basis of the trade embargo in force against Cuba today.
Despite the losses of their members, the more radical elements of the Brothers to the Rescue group were “really happy,” said Gonzalez, who infiltrated the United States from 1991 to 1998 before his eventual arrest and imprisonment. “They got four people killed but they achieved a law that has hurt us a lot.” Brothers to the Rescue, founded in 1991, became more hardline in the mid-1990s in the belief that the Cuban communist regime had its days numbered after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main benefactor, Gonzalez said.
The ex-spy recalled a flight over Havana in 1994 in which Brothers to the Rescue drew close to the seaside promenade and dropped flares and smoke bombs, an incident covered in detail at the time by US media. But not everybody in Brothers to the Rescue endorsed violence, Gonzalez said. The four people killed in the Cuban shootdown included two young men — Carlos Costa and Mario de la Pena — who only wanted to save boat people, said Gonzalez. “They had nothing to do with the other plans,” he said.
The United States on Wednesday indicted former president Raul Castro on murder charges over the 1996 plane shootdown, a stunning new step in President Donald Trump’s pressure on the communist state. It raised speculation that Trump could use the charges as a pretext to attack the island and seize Castro, 94, the younger brother of Fidel who remains influential in Cuban politics. Gonzalez said Washington’s indictment of Castro was not surprising, “given the context of aggressiveness that the Trump administration has generated as it resorts to gunboat diplomacy,” he said. In January, US special forces ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, a key ally of Cuba, in a deadly raid on Caracas.
© 2024 AFP
