The Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar declared this Wednesday, May 20, that "today is a glorious day for the Cuban people" and that "the end of the Castro family begins," during a press conference held at the Capitol in Washington D.C. alongside her colleagues Carlos Giménez, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Nicole Malliotakis.
The trigger for the act was the historic announcement of a federal criminal charge against Raúl Castro, 94 years old, for the shooting down of two civilian aircraft belonging to the organization Brothers to the Rescue on February 24, 1996, in which four Cuban Americans lost their lives.
On the podium, the Cuban-American congressmen displayed photographs of the four victims with the caption "Murdered on February 24, 1996, by order of Raúl Castro," alongside posters bearing the slogans SOS Cuba and Cuba Libre.
Salazar sent a direct message to the Castro family: "Understand clearly that your days are over. A federal charge is a serious matter."
The congresswoman used the example of Nicolás Maduro—captured on January 3 in Caracas by U.S. forces, and currently imprisoned in a federal facility in New York—as an explicit warning: "Maduro thought that President Trump was not serious. Look where Maduro is today, in a federal prison in New York."
He urged the Castros to leave power before facing the same fate: "It is time for them to go. They have the option not to end up where Maduro is. They can leave now and leave the island in the hands of the opposition, in the hands of freedom."
Salazar also thanked President Trump for taking the initiative and described Cuba as "the epicenter of evil in this hemisphere," emphasizing that a friendly and prosperous Cuba would benefit the economy, politics, and migration in the United States.
The key evidence in the case is an audio recording from June 1996, lasting 11 minutes and 32 seconds, published in 2006 by journalist Wilfredo Cancio in El Nuevo Herald, in which Castro describes the order: "I said to try to knock them down over the territory, but they would enter Havana and leave... Well, knock them down in the sea when they appear."
Additionally, over 10,000 pages of declassified FBI documents reveal the existence of an "Operation Venice," planned since February 13, 1996, which indicates premeditation of the attack.
In parallel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a video message to the Cuban people in which he called for the construction of "a new Cuba" with free elections, economic freedoms, and independent press, and he recalled the offer of 100 million dollars in food and medicine, conditional on the distribution being carried out by the Catholic Church or independent charitable organizations, not GAESA.
José Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue and the sole survivor of the 1996 attack, reacted with emotion: "I have wished for this for a long time. I have wished for justice to be served, for justice to become a reality."
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