Miami’s exile community celebrates indictment of Raúl Castro: ‘Trump has made the people regain hope’

About 50 people, some holding signs and Cuban flags, gathered Wednesday outside the iconic Versailles restaurant on Calle Ocho in Miami, a regular meeting point for the Cuban exile community. The atmosphere was celebratory. And besides commemorating the island’s independence, the occasion was the indictment of Raúl Castro.

U.S. federal prosecutors announced in the morning at a high-profile event at Miami’s Freedom Tower that they had filed charges against 94-year-old Castro and five other military officers over the 1996 shooting down of two aircraft belonging to the exile organization Brothers to the Rescue, an incident that killed four people. The charges against Castro, amid an escalation of pressure by the Trump administration on Havana, revived parallels with the strategy Washington used against Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. That line was taken by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel in his reaction to the news, and also by several people attending the celebration outside Versailles.

“I think it’s something the people have been waiting for and I also think it’s a U.S. strategy to have a legal reason to intervene in Cuba,” says Maribel Ramírez, 31, born in Havana and living in Miami for 15 years, who was wearing a red cap bearing the words Make Cuba Great Again. “At least we have hope again, which was something that had been lost. Donald Trump has made the people regain hope.”

Another participant in the demonstration who says she has more hope than ever is María Rodríguez, 62, who left Cuba aged five in 1968 and was processed with her family at the Freedom Tower. She says “it was high time” charges were brought against Raúl Castro. “I think it’s perfect. And the only thing I hope is that they really go and remove him,” as they did with Maduro. “We have a lot of hope that that will happen,” she says.

The gathering coincided with a rally organized by the Florida Republican Party in the restaurant parking lot, where county and city commissioners, election officials, and other local politicians took the opportunity to deliver speeches with a common tone of praise for President Donald Trump. Given the venue and the occasion, the speeches were interspersed with anti-Cuban regime messages and celebrations of the fact that — in the view of those in attendance — the United States was finally willing to hold accountable those who attacked U.S. citizens, even decades after the events took place.

Agustín Acosta, a former political prisoner who carried a sign with images of Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro reading “assassins and terrorists,” says some exiles had long planned to gather to commemorate May 20 and were surprised by the news of Castro’s indictment: “That has given us much more hope,” he says.

Since Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, the island’s government had pushed aside May 20, the date the Republic of Cuba was proclaimed in 1902. It promoted January 1 as the day the revolution triumphed, making it the principal national sovereignty anniversary.

“The Castro dictatorship made sure to erase this date — the Republic, independence,” Acosta notes. “In Cuba, I remember celebrating May 20 as a child; it was supreme joy. All Cubans celebrated it, the richest and the poorest. But the dictatorship absorbs everything, destroys everything, and controls everything. That is the problem,” he adds. Now May 20 has additional meaning.

Hours earlier, the morning event at the Freedom Tower had brought together influential figures from the Cuban exile community and became a kind of political and social gathering. In addition to relatives of the victims of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that were shot down, who occupied the front rows, there were leaders of exile organizations, Miami-Dade officials, administrators from the Cuban American Museum, executives from Miami Dade College and FIU, as well as police chiefs and other local officials who mingled amid hugs and photographs, catching up.

One attendee was Jorge Mas Santos, president of the Cuban American National Foundation, founded by his father, exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa. “Today justice is being served, in the name of the victims of the planes shot down. For their families it is a day of relief and also a day to tell the world the truth about the Cuban regime,” Mas said. “We have been under a totalitarian, repressive regime for 70 years, but the most beautiful thing is that we are sensing and living through days when we can see the end of the Castro regime with the leadership of President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”

For Maggie Alejandre Khully, sister of Armando Alejandre, one of those killed in the attack on the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft, the focus was justice: “We are not necessarily happy because it is also a sad day, but we have spent 30 years trying to find justice in this case. And if it is, as they say it will be, an indictment of Raúl Castro, it is something we wanted from day one, because the shooters are not the only ones responsible, but the intellectual authors of the crime are as well, and certainly Raúl, as head of the Air Force, must have had something to do with it. So now we’ll see how it unfolds, and it is important.”

Marlene Alejandre-Triana, the daughter of Armando Alejandre, added that they hoped the announcement would be “one step closer to justice for our relatives, especially my father, who was an American citizen and a veteran.”

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