Three months after the downing of the planes from Hermanos al Rescate, the survivors were summoned to hear for the first time the recordings of the communications between the Cuban military pilots during the attack on February 24, 1996. What they heard left them speechless.
Sylvia Iriondo, who was aboard the third aircraft along with her husband Andrés and the pilot José Basulto, describes those recordings as "chilling": in them the Cuban pilots can be heard celebrating with crude remarks the destruction of unarmed and defenseless civilian aircraft in international airspace.
One of the phrases recorded in those recordings encapsulates the brutality of the moment: “The other is destroyed, the other is destroyed. Patio to death, bastards”.
Iriondo recalls that during the attack, Basulto warned them from the cockpit: “We are next, they are going to shoot us down”. She and her husband held hands, convinced that they would be the next to be downed.
Despite what they witnessed, the survivor confesses that they clung to hope for hours: "We always hoped that what happened wasn't the reality of the event," she recounts. They thought that maybe the other pilots had simply been ordered to land on the island.
After the attack, Basulto reported what had happened over the radio. The authorities ordered them to land at the base in Key West, but the pilot refused: "Why should we go to Key West when our hangar is in Miami, the hangar of Brothers to the Rescue, where our people, our community, and above all, the families will be?" he said, according to Iriondo's account.
The small plane then headed to the hangar at Opa-locka in Miami, where a distressed crowd of men and women had already gathered, listening to the limited news on the radio, "terrified by what they were hearing," Iriondo recalls.
That crime, committed in the Florida Strait in international airspace as determined by the ICAO, claimed the lives of four young individuals who that day were voluntarily participating as pilots and observers for the humanitarian organization.
"This crime claimed the lives of Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario Manuel de la Peña, and Pablo Morales, four extraordinary young men," says Iriondo. "The oldest was 45 years old, Armando Alejandre, and the youngest was 24, Mario Manuel de la Peña."
Thirty years later, the U.S. Department of Justice filed criminal charges against Raúl Castro and five other Cuban military officials for this crime on May 20, 2026, a symbolic date marking Cuba's Independence Day.
The charges include conspiracy to assassinate American citizens, destruction of aircraft, and four counts of homicide. A federal grand jury in Florida had approved them at the end of April, although they were not made public until that date.
The responsibility of Raúl Castro in the attack was documented in an audio recording published in 2006 by journalist Wilfredo Cancio Isla in El Nuevo Herald, in which the then Minister of the Armed Forces says: “I said that they should try to shoot them down over the territory... Well, shoot them down in the sea when they appear.”
Iriondo describes the indictment as "an effective first step" after three decades of fighting for justice and regrets that her late husband Andrés was unable to witness this moment.
Filed under: