The story of the shooting in Cuba in 1996 that led to the impeachment of Raúl Castro

In February 1996, three small civilian planes took off from Miami airport, operated by a Cuban exile group searching for people who wanted to flee the island nation on rafts. Two of these planes were shot down by Cuban military aircraft, killing four people.

Now, 30 years later, the fatal shooting seems to be the focus of potential criminal liability of the government against one of the most powerful figures in Cuba.

The US is moving to impeach Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old who led Cuba after the retirement of his older brother, Fidel, CBS News first reporting last week. The impeachment would mark an escalation of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Cuba and a new chapter in the long, strained US relationship with the Castro family.

The flying organization, Brothers to the Rescue, was founded in the early 1990s by José Basulto, a Cuban American who described himself as a participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-sponsored operation to oust Fidel Castro in 1961.

The group conducted search and rescue flights in the waters between Florida and Cuba, helping thousands of people who fled Cuba in makeshift boats, according to Basulto. He later said that the group also wanted to help Castro’s rivals. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration stopped automatically admitting these migrants to the US, causing the number of people going to sea on rafts to drop dramatically.

The Cuban government has accused Brothers to the Rescue of repeatedly violating its airspace and distributing anti-Castro pamphlets, which it called “illegal and provocative acts”. Cuba also said that the group wanted to blow up the electrical infrastructure, allegations that seem to come from a former member of Brothers to the Rescue who returned to Cuba in 1996.

Basulto said he had not planned to drop leaflets on the day of the shooting. Asked in 1999 about allegations that Brothers to Rescue violated Cuban sovereignty, Basulto said he had the right to enter and leave his country.

“I’m not an outsider there,” he said in a 1999 interview with the University of Miami’s Institute for Public History. “And that sovereignty belongs to the people of Cuba, not to the governor, … and I do not violate the sovereignty of my country, which is Cuba, by being there.”

Three planes of this group, carrying eight people in total, took off from the Opa Locka Airport after one o’clock in the afternoon on February 24, 1996, and flew to Cuba, according to a detailed report by the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Just before 3 p.m., Basulto radioed air traffic controllers in Havana telling them his plane was crossing Cuba’s air defense zone, an area outside the country’s airspace where planes are required to declare themselves. The air traffic controller warned that he was “risking himself,” and Basulto replied that “we are ready to do that as free Cubans.”

Less than half an hour later, one of the group’s Cessnas was destroyed by a MiG-29 fighter jet operating in Cuba, killing one American citizen and a green card holder. The second plane was destroyed a short time later, killing two American citizens.

“This one is no longer with us,” the Cuban pilot was recorded saying in Spanish after the first plane was shot down, according to a radio transcript in the ICAO report.

“It’s fatherland or death,” said the pilot after the second Cessna was hit.

A third plane, carrying Basulto and three crew members, landed safely in Florida.

Basulto said CBS News Miami earlier this yearabout the 30th anniversary of the shooting: “I remember saying to Sylvia Iriondo on the plane, ‘we’re next.'”

An ICAO investigation later concluded that the planes were shot down over international waters, a few miles outside Cuban airspace. Cuban and American radar data conflict, Cuba says the planes were inside its airspace, according to ICAO, so the agency based its findings on data from a nearby ship.

ICAO also noted that international law prohibits countries from shooting down civilian aircraft, even from within their own aircraft. And the organization found that Cuba did not attempt drastic measures, including radio communication with the planes or removing them from Cuban airspace. Banning civil aviation should be a “last resort,” ICAO wrote.

For a long time, Cuba has defended its decision to shoot down the planes, insisting that Brothers to the Rescue has entered the country’s sovereignty. Months later, Fidel Castro admitted to former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather that he had ordered the military to stop the planes from entering Cuba, although he said he and his brother, Raúl Castro, had not directly ordered the two Cessna planes to be shot down on Feb. 24.

In an interview with Time magazine, Fidel Castro said after several incursions into Cuban airspace: “We have ordered the military that we will not tolerate it anymore.”

The US reacted angrily to the shooting. Within weeks, Congress passed tough sanctions on Cuba, and former President Bill Clinton suspended chartered flights to the island and increased coverage of Cuba by a US-funded radio station.

“The planes pose no threat to the security of Cuba,” Clinton said in a speech a few days after the Cessnas were shot down. “Although the group in charge of the aircraft had entered the Cuban airspace in the past with other aircraft, this is not a reason for the attack, and it provides – I emphasize – no legal basis under international law for the attack.”

Years later, one man was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder by shooting, after US prosecutors accused him of being a Cuban spy and trying to pass information on Brothers to the Rescue planes. After more than ten years in prison, he returned to Cuba in a prisoner exchange in 2014. Two pilots and the head of Cuba’s air force were also charged with murder in federal court but never tried.

This incident was also heard in the civil court. The families of some of the slain Cessna pilots sued the Cuban government, and a federal judge awarded them about $50 million in compensatory damages and just over $137 million in punitive damages.

But in recent months, the Brothers to the Rescue case has rekindled interest, among other Florida lawmakers and members of Miami’s Cuban American community. calling charges against Raúl Castro, who was leading the Cuban army when the planes were shot down.

A possible case arises from a critical moment in US-Cuba relations. The Trump administration has imposed an oil embargo on the island, worsening the country’s electricity shortages and leading to widespread blackouts. Administration officials pressured Cuba to make political and economic reforms, and they did gave Cuba $100 million in aidwhile President Trump floats a “friendly takeover” of the country.

The charges against Raúl Castro could also come months after US forces arrested former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro – an ally of the Cuban government – and took him to New York to face criminal charges.