US weaponizes Cold War justice to obscure decades of covert destabilization against Cuba
Original framing: “US indicts Cuba’s Raul Castro over 1996 plane downing” — Al Jazeera
The 1996 shootdown occurred amid decades of CIA-backed exile groups bombing Cuban hotels, airliners, and civilian targets, with over 3,000 documented attacks since the 1960s. US attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro span over 600 documented plots, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, which killed 73 civilians. The current indictment echoes Cold War-era legal maneuvers, such as the 1962 OAS sanctions against Cuba, used to justify economic strangulation.
The US indictment of Raul Castro is not a legal act but a geopolitical tool, obscuring decades of US aggression against Cuba—from CIA assassination plots to economic warfare—while framing Cuban self-defense as criminal.
This narrative serves the US's long-standing project of maintaining hegemony in the Caribbean, a pattern that echoes colonial and Cold War-era interventions. Indigenous and Afro-Cuban perspectives reveal this as part of a broader struggle against racialized domination, while historical records confirm Cuba's right to self-defense under international law. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of a system that prosecutes victims while harboring their aggressors. True justice lies not in punitive legalism but in dismantling the structural violence of the embargo and centering Cuban sovereignty, as seen in the island's global medical solidarity. The path forward requires binational truth-telling, economic cooperation, and a rejection of US imperialism's enduring legacy.