'Justice with a capital J': Cuban American analyst tells VOZ News what Raúl Castro's indictment means for exiles

For the millions of Cubans inside and outside the island, the formal accusation against Raúl Castro for the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996 means, in the words of Cuban-American political analyst Silvio Canto Jr. in VOZ News, "justice in capital letters."

Canto Jr. recalled the episode as one of the most brutal actions of the Castro dictatorship. Three of the four victims of that attack were born in Miami; that is, they were U.S. citizens, a fact that the analyst underscored as he celebrated the fact that the case is finally advancing in U.S. courts after decades of inaction by Washington. For him, the Brothers to the Rescue operation—which sought to help rafters in the Florida Straits—had seemed at the time "so fantastic and so human."

The conversation, conducted by VOZ executive producer Karina Yapor, soon drifted from the judicial to the personal. The Cuban-American analyst told how he arrived in the United States, like many of his compatriots, at the age of 12, and that it was his parents who bore the burden of exile. His father, who was a banker in Cuba, worked for four years as a porter in a hotel. "I have always been so proud of my parents for all the sacrifices," he said, visibly moved.

To that family memory he added two more stories. The first was that of his father's cousin, physician Ignacio Segurola, a highly reputable professional who at an event said that Castro was a communist: "They put him in prison and he was imprisoned for 14 years without a trial. He was finally released in 1975, when the president of France intervened and some prisoners were released," Canto said.

The second was the testimony entrusted to him by a man who escaped from the island on one of those fragile rafts where many Cubans died in the attempt to reach the U.S. fleeing communism.

"I was on the boat when a child couldn't take it anymore, and a little baby died, and that mother had to throw him into the sea," Canto said, reconstructing what that survivor had told him. "Someone has to pay for that someday." Canto linked the petition to today's indictment against former dictator Raúl Castro because, in his words, it is not simply about the four men who died in 1996, but about the thousands of Cubans who saw their own die at sea, in the dungeons of the regime, in repression or from hunger.

Canto, moreover, highlighted Washington's turn against the Castro regime at the will of President Donald Trump and the influence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He contrasted it with Barack Obama's diplomatic opening, which he recalled reproachfully: "When President Obama opened relations with Cuba, he went to Cuba and watched a baseball game with Raul Castro, and many of us were fighting and saying: please demand something from Raul Castro,' and he didn't demand anything from him." In his view, those relations "did not cost the dictatorship anything."

Regarding Raúl Castro's future, the analyst was skeptical about the possibility of an arrest like that of the former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Canto said the entourage of the former Cuban dictator, Fidel's brother, would rather get him off the island to protect the family fortune than risk seeing him arrested. His priority, he said, is elsewhere: "The only thing that matters to me at this stage of the game is that Raúl and all his people leave, that they take all the money they want," he said, convinced that prosperity will come to a free Cuba. "May there be freedom for Cubans; that's what we all want."