MIAMI — The voice of Raúl Castro crackles from a laptop in Miami, near the living room rocking chair of Brothers to the Rescue founder José Basulto.
“We were attacked by Cuban MiGs while on a mission to find survivors,” Basulto said.
The family says the audio clip documents the Cuban leader’s order to open fire on the humanitarian group’s planes in 1996.
“You got me, yes on the left side,” one pilot says in archived audio.
The group had been flying over the Florida Straits searching for Cubans fleeing the island by sea.
“When the MiGs attacked, I saw through the right window of the plane,” Basulto recalled.
“Get out of there,” another voice says in archive audio.
“Black smoke,” Basulto said.
Four people were killed.
“We were brothers, so we suffered in the family,” Basulto said.
The Associated Press is now reporting that the United States may be seeking to indict 94-year-old Castro in connection with the deadly shootdown.
“It was about time. It’s 30 years,” Basulto said. “U.S. citizens flying U.S. planes were shot down by the Cuban government on the orders of Raúl Castro, and to this day justice has been delayed, therefore justice has been denied.”
“If it does happen, it is an act of justice, a necessary justice,” said Orlando Gutiérrez-Boronat. “The possibility the regime is brought to justice is a godsend.”
“They savagely massacred these four young men,” Gutiérrez-Boronat said. “They were my good friends, my brothers. I think of them daily because they were good men dedicated to saving human lives, and they were horribly massacred on that day in February 1996.”
Gutiérrez-Boronat, secretary general of the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, joined by Zoom from Honduras, where he said members have been meeting with high-ranking government officials to build Latin American consensus on freedom for Cuba.
“The consensus should be that fundamental political change takes place in Cuba, that the dictatorship ends, that political prisoners are released, that repression stops, that a provisional government can establish a timetable for true elections, that the Cuban economy can be deregulated, and Cubans can be the owners of their own work,” he said. “That is the essence of what we are trying to achieve.”
“In the past few weeks, we have met with the presidents of Chile and Paraguay, the vice president of Costa Rica, and now we are in Honduras,” Gutiérrez-Boronat said.
“It is an initiative of the Cuban democratic forces to bring about true change in Cuba, and of course, we are in fluid communication with the U.S. State Department,” he added.
The pending indictment comes as the United States continues its maximum pressure campaign on Cuba.
“I don’t know what the specific conversations with the director of the CIA were, but we have been very clear what a future of freedom and security can look like,” said Rosa María Payá. “And in that future, the Castro family is not in power.”
Payá, a Cuban human rights and democracy activist, said she is more hopeful than ever that regime change is nearing and is formalizing a roadmap to transition the island from dictatorship to democracy.
“At the beginning of March this year, we launched the ‘Freedom Accord,’ which gathers the main democratic forces on the island and in exile behind a transition plan in phases,” Payá said. “Liberation, but also stabilization, reconstruction and finally democratization.”
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