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Rocío Monasterio, former Spanish leader of the Vox party with Cuban roots, reacted with enthusiasm this Thursday to the formal charges against Raúl Castro in the United States for the downing of two planes from Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, posting on her X account: “Finally, justice will be served! At last, the murderer Raúl Castro will pay for his crimes.”
Monasterio reacted this way to the breaking news reported by the Spanish media outlet ABC.es regarding the formal charge against the former Cuban dictator, which includes accusations of conspiracy to murder American citizens, destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of homicide.
In a previous message, Monasterio shared the video of the message to the Cuban people from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and wrote: «#Cuba closer to freedom. Thank you @SecRubio for all that work, for giving us hope, for bringing back our dreams!».
The trigger was the announcement by the Acting Attorney General of the U.S., Todd Blanche, who presented the formal charges this Wednesday, May 20, at the Tower of Freedom in Miami, coinciding with Cuba's Independence Day.
Blanche stated, "For the first time in nearly 70 years, high-ranking officials of the Cuban regime are being accused in the United States for acts of violence that resulted in the deaths of American citizens."
The indictment, approved by a federal grand jury in Miami on April 23 and declassified on Wednesday, is based on an audio recording from June 1996 in which Raúl Castro orders the shootdown: "Well, bring them down in the sea when they show up; and do not consult those with the authority."
The four victims of the crash —Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario Manuel de la Peña, and Pablo Morales— were residents of Miami. Their bodies were never recovered.
Alongside Castro, five Cuban military personnel were charged, including Lorenzo Alberto Pérez-Pérez, identified as the pilot who fired the missiles, and Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, arrested in November 2025 in U.S. territory for immigration fraud.
Monasterio has a deep personal connection to the Cuban cause. She is the daughter of a Cuban father born in Cienfuegos in 1929, whose family lost sugar estate properties after the Revolution of 1959. In February 2023, she was appointed as "Ambassador of the Cuban Exile in Spain" by the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance in Miami.
Dismissed as the regional president of Vox in Madrid in October 2024, she has continued to speak out about Cuba on social media. On April 30, she wrote that "ending the regime in Havana is a moral obligation" to demonstrate to the world the failure of communism.
The accusation has a fundamentally symbolic scope: Raúl Castro, 94 years old, has never set foot on U.S. soil and there is no extradition treaty between Cuba and the U.S. However, if found guilty, he could face life imprisonment or the death penalty. Cuban-American attorney Willy Allen was emphatic in assessing the situation: “Right now he is a fugitive from U.S. law”.
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