The U.S. Justice Department is expected to indict Cuban leader Raúl Castro on Wednesday — and further raise expectations, especially in Miami's Cuban exile community, of a U.S. military strike in Cuba.
The 94-year-old Castro, communist Cuba’s de facto leader, would be charged with ordering the 1996 shootdown of two small, unarmed planes off Cuba, killing four Cuban exile occupants belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue organization that aided Cuban rafters escaping the island.
Miami Cubans were set to celebrate the announcement at the downtown Freedom Tower on May 20, Cuban Independence Day. But many also hope it will be a prelude to more serious U.S. intervention in Cuba than the apparently stalled reform negotiations President Trump’s administration has been holding with the regime.
“If the only thing that happens is symbolic, then frustration is going to mount and there are going to be a lot of people upset," Cuban exile Andy Gomez, former director of the University of Miami's Cuban and Cuban-American Studies Institute, told WLRN.
"I don't think they have a plan. And the lack of a strategy [on Cuba] can backfire on Trump as well, as Iran has backfired.”
Gomez points out the pressure Trump has mounted on Cuba this year — including a de facto oil blockade of the island — has created high expectations for all-out regime change there sooner than later.
And that includes a possible U.S. military strike to attain that goal — which a frustrated Trump may feel forced to undertake if the regime continues to refuse to liberalize its repressive political and economic systems.
“Short of a military action," Gomez said, "I don’t think the Cuban government is going to change any time soon.”
Gomez said the U.S. may consider reports of a new Cuban drone stockpile, acquired from Russia and Iran, to be a national security threat rationale for military action.
But what would a U.S. military operation look like in Cuba?
Perhaps capturing Castro the way U.S. special forces this year collared Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was also under U.S indictment? Problem is, that didn’t bring down Venezuela’s regime — and it likely wouldn’t topple Cuba’s either.
“Would it be a decapitation operation like we saw in Venezuela? Or a regime change occupation? Or something else entirely?" said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the nonprofit Cuba Study Group in Washington D.C.
"We really don’t know.”
READ MORE: Majority of South Florida Cubans support a U.S. military strike, poll shows
For now, Cuban exile leaders like Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, national secretary of the Miami-based Cuban Democratic Directorate, insist Raúl Castro's indictment would not be merely symbolic but would undermine Cuba’s regime.
“It’ll let the butchers who’ve ruled Cuba for 67 years know that their days of impunity are over, and that their actions have consequences," Gutierrez-Boronat said.
"I think that’s very important in preventing the regime from killing people who are now protesting” its rule.
Gutierrez-Boronat believes Cubans are lashing out at the island’s human rights abuses and humanitarian suffering — the regime has admitted that the country has all but run out of fuel and blackouts in some places are lasting days. But he also echoed a recent Miami Herald poll in which exiles clamored for a U.S. military solution.
“People in Cuba have put up barricades; they’re protesting," Gutierrez-Boronat said. "My hope lies in that kind of uprising against the regime.
"Now, would we support a military intervention that returns sovereignty to the Cuban people? A hundred percent.”
Herrero of the Cuba Study Group says Trump may also be enticed by military action because he’s created a difficult cycle for himself: The more economic pressure he exerts on Cuba, the more humanitarian assistance the U.S. needs to send there — like the $100 million in aid it promised last week — which then helps the regime buy time.
“The Cubans," Herrero said, "have always shown that they’re very good at running the clock.”
With Trump possibly feeling hair-trigger, though, Herrero says that regime tactic is most likely "a mistake."
