The state of Florida has issued a warrant for the arrest of Raúl Castro, 95 years old, without the option of bail for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, related to the downing of two aircraft belonging to Brothers to the Rescue in 1996, as reported on Monday by the network WSVN.
The order was signed on October 16 by Judge Ariana Fajardo Orshan, president of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida, following an investigation by the state's Department of Law Enforcement.
This Monday, Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, announced it publicly at a press conference held at Florida International University (FIU), alongside Governor Ron DeSantis.
The document states that, if Castro were to be detained outside the state, the authorities in Florida are empowered to seek his full extradition.
The jurisdictional basis for the order rests on the activities of two Cuban agents infiltrated in Brothers to the Rescue who operated in Miami and at the Naval Air Station in Key West between 1995 and February 1996.
According to the affidavit, those spies transmitted information about the group's flights to Cuban authorities and monitored military facilities on Floridian soil. Additionally, the network instructed its infiltrators not to fly with the organization between February 24 and 27, 1996, and one of them left Florida on February 23—one day before the attack—to return to Cuba.
The authorities deemed that these activities, conducted on Floridan territory, constitute sufficient probable cause to establish state jurisdiction and to uphold that Castro issued the orders for the conspiracy.
This legal action is separate from the federal charges brought by the Department of Justice on May 20 of this year, which indicted Castro and five other former Cuban military personnel with seven charges: four counts of individual murder, two counts of aircraft destruction, and one count of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens.
Since that date, Castro is considered a fugitive from federal justice, having failed to appear before any court.
On February 24, 1996, MiG fighters from the Cuban Air Force shot down two Cessna 337 planes from Brothers to the Rescue over international waters in the Florida Straits, killing Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. Their bodies were never recovered.
The central evidence against Castro includes an audio recording from June 1996—released in 2006 by journalist Wilfredo Cancio Isla in the newspaper El Nuevo Herald—in which the then Minister of Armed Forces describes the order to shoot down with his own words: «Take them down at sea when they appear; and do not consult those who have the authority».
The only defendant currently in U.S. custody is Luis Raúl González-Pardo Rodríguez, a former lieutenant colonel in the Cuban Air Force, transferred to Miami in June 2026 and who pleaded not guilty on the 23rd of that month.
The absence of an extradition treaty between Cuba and the United States currently hinders the practical execution of both orders as long as Castro remains on the island, although the Trump administration has indicated that it does not rule out unconventional mechanisms to bring him to justice.
Relatives of the victims received the announcement with restrained relief. "Justice has been served. Not completely, but it's a step toward justice," one of them stated. Another added, "My father fought for a free Cuba. That was the most important thing to him. It was all that mattered to him."
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