Milagros María Suárez del Pino has been fighting a legal battle against the Cuban regime for nearly six decades over the kidnapping, torture, and death of her father, the Cuban-American pilot Rafael del Pino Siero, who was a close friend of Fidel Castro before turning into his declared enemy.
In a report by CNN en Español, Milagros shared her father's story with the only evidence she has: handwritten letters, photos, newspaper clippings, and a small flight log.
My dad was a pilot, and he left here betrayed by Fidel Castro, said Milagros, who describes her father as a loving and intelligent man through the correspondence they exchanged.
Rafael del Pino Siero —not to be confused with the pilot Rafael del Pino Díaz, a brigadier general of the DAAFAR who defected in 1987 and currently leads the Cuban Movement of Military Conscientious Objectors in exile— was born in Havana in 1926, served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, and obtained U.S. citizenship in 1950.
He shared university years with the dictator Fidel Castro at the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana, where they maintained a close friendship. Among the documents that Milagros keeps are letters signed by Castro in 1955 from Mexico, with messages such as “greetings to your wife and a big hug from your friend Fidel.”
However, when Del Pino understood the communist direction that the so-called "Cuban revolution" was taking, he decided to break with Castro. "When my dad realized what he was planning to do, my dad wanted to end the friendship," his daughter explained.
According to the family, on July 25, 1959, Del Pino was deceived with a supposed flight to pick up passengers in Cuba. "My dad went out to apparently look for some passengers in Cuba, but it was a betrayal," Milagros recounted.
Del Pino Siero was subjected to a military trial lasting less than nine hours, sentenced to 30 years in prison on the charge of being a spy for the United States, and incarcerated in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he suffered isolation and torture for almost two decades.
Milagros' mother even wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson to request Del Pino's release, but to no avail. In 1977, just days before his expected release, he was found dead in his cell.
Cuban authorities stated that he had committed suicide by hanging, a version that the family outright rejects. "We knew that when my mom received that call two weeks later and they said that he had killed himself, that he had drowned, it was impossible," Milagros asserted.
The family then embarked on a lengthy legal battle. In 2008, a jury in Miami-Dade County found the Republic of Cuba, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Interior, and Fidel and Raúl Castro liable, ordering compensation of approximately 260 million dollars.
In December 2021, a judge in Florida updated the judgment to 626.2 million dollars, an amount that the Cuban regime has not paid.
“The only way the family can achieve justice, in part, is through the civil court, and that’s exactly what we did,” Milagros stated. To pursue compensation, the family moved the case to Spain, where it has been processed in a Madrid court since 2022 the seizure of Cuban assets in Spanish territory, a path that lawyers find more viable than the American one.
The case gained new momentum this year after the federal indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice against Raúl Castro for the shooting down of two civilian planes from the organization Brothers to the Rescue on February 24, 1996, with charges of conspiracy to assassinate U.S. citizens and four counts of homicide. The Cuban regime describes both this process and the Del Pino case as political measures.
"Now, I don't know if it will be possible to collect or not, but that is the only avenue the family has," concluded Milagros, who at her age continues to stand firm against the impunity of the regime that, according to U.S. courts, kidnapped, tortured, and killed her father.
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