On May 16, 2026, the New York Times (NYT) published the article With Possible Raúl Castro Indictment, U.S. Eyes Venezuela Playbook.

Reporting on the May 13 visit to Cuba by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Ratcliff, the article trumpeted the ultimatum the CIA chief publicly delivered in Havana on behalf of the Trump administration: “Shut down Russian and Chinese listening posts and take steps to open the economy.”

The Times uncritically, if not gleefully, reported how Washington’s economic war, intensified with the U.S. petroleum blockade since the end of last year, has forced the Cuban people into a dire economic situation, with Cuba running out of diesel and fuel oil as of May 13.

The Times also promoted the lies peddled by capitalist politicians — Democrats and Republicans — casting Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” for shooting down in 1996 two Brothers to the Rescue planes after pilots from the group led by ultra-rightist Cuban Americans ignored repeated warnings to stop violating the country’s airspace.^[1]

That incident 30 years ago is now being used to prepare an indictment by U.S. prosecutors against Raúl Castro, who was Cuba’s defense minister in 1996, and served as the country’s president between 2008 and 2018. Castro is also a general of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and a historic leader of the Cuban Revolution. The Times presented a favorable account of this development.

That’s “all the news that’s fit to print” for the U.S. establishment.

The short article below is an apt response to the New York Times hack piece promoting U.S. imperialist aggression against Cuba and its people. We share the author’s viewpoint.

It first appeared on the Facebook page of Pete Seidman, a leader of the Miami Coalition to End the U.S. Blockade of Cuba. We publish it, with light editing, with the author’s permission for the information of our readers.

— World-Outlook editors

*

By Pete Seidman

MIAMI — The NYT reporters who put their names on this shameful advance apology and roadmap for U.S. war with Cuba will no doubt find a special place in hell.

They report the ultimatum the CIA delivered to Cuba but ignore Cuba’s response, one that completely denied the Yankee’s accusations and asserted Cuba’s absolute right to sovereignty.

They repeat the lies about the Brothers to the Rescue and, as usual, attempt to cast Cuba — which has been the target of hundreds of terrorist attacks (Bay of Pigs, germ warfare, assassination attempts against literacy teachers and Fidel Castro and in between, blowing up of hotels and planes and department stores…) — in the role of “state sponsor of terrorism.”

A sick lie! A lie designed to motivate and prettify the Helms Burton Act, essentially a law outlawing the Cuban Revolution itself (and warning any future such “outlaws” as well).

Take note that the Times says the CIA met with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, Raúl Castro’s grandson. This is part of Washington’s mythic hunt for a Delcy Rodríguez in the revolution’s leadership. (Rodríguez is the head of Venezuela’s new government leading the country’s wholesale submission to U.S. imperialism since the January 3 U.S. military assault and kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro.)

The Cubans reported that the meeting was at the level of the ministry of the interior where a Judas Iscariot is not likely to be found. Because Cuba is not Venezuela.

A Venezuelan playbook is not going to take place in Cuba.

But the publication of this article is a sobering warning that the frustrated Trump administration (Iran, China!) is actively considering this option, nonetheless. The wish, with the help of the Times’ journalistic snake oil, can be father to the deed.

Our movement against the blockade of Cuba needs to organize contingency plans. We will not immediately be able to stop whatever war crimes the US may commit. But we need to begin the work of forging a serious unity in action that ultimately can assemble the forces that will be a part of an international movement that will.

Pete Seidman is a leader of the Miami Coalition to End the U.S. Blockade of Cuba.

NOTES

[1] Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces shot down on February 24, 1996, two of three Cessna aircraft that had violated the country’s airspace. Despite unambiguous warnings by Cuban air traffic controllers, the planes invaded Cuban airspace on a course toward the capital city of Havana. The aircraft, which took off from the Opa-locka airport near Miami, Florida, were piloted by members of Brothers to the Rescue, a group led by Cuban American counterrevolutionaries, a number of them with long histories of armed action against the Cuban state dating back to the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the CIA.

According to the Cuban government’s account, the invasion of Cuban airspace on that Saturday afternoon was the second hostile incursion that day by the same kind of aircraft, and the tenth such violation of Cuban territory over the previous 20 months, involving some 30 planes all told. Throughout this period, Washington had done nothing to stop these escalating provocations organized from U.S. soil.

According to a February 25, 1996, statement issued by the Cuban foreign ministry, between 10:15 and 11:27 a.m. on Saturday morning, February 24, 2996, three Cessna planes crossed over into Cuba’s airspace and retreated to the north after being intercepted by Cuban air force fighters. Later, at 1:21 p.m., the air traffic control center in Havana detected one of the planes once again heading toward Cuban airspace “north of the capital,” the statement said, “and they were warned… of the risks they were running by doing this. In response the pilot of the pirate plane said it was clear he could not fly in that zone, but he was going to do it anyway.”

This part of the Cuban government account was confirmed by the transcript of radio messages released February 27, 1996, by then U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, based on U.S. intelligence recordings. The transcript reports the following exchange (translated from the Spanish) between the Havana air control tower and “Cessna 3,” piloted by José Basulto, the founding leader of Brothers to the Rescue.

“Havana: Sir, be informed that the zone north of Havana is activated, [garble] you, danger behind 24 north parallel.

“Cessna 3: We are aware that we are in danger each time we cross the area to the south of the 24th [parallel] but we are willing to do it as free Cubans.”

By 3:15 p.m., the Cuban statement said, the Revolutionary Armed Forces knew from “internal communications of one of the pilots that they were heading toward Havana. Meanwhile, two of the planes were penetrating the restricted zone of Cuban airspace. The head of the group in a third plane [Basulto] remained outside of the 12-mile limit.” Then, between 3:21 and 3:28 p.m., the “two pirate Cessna planes … were shot down by our armed forces … at a distance of 5 and 8 miles north of the Baracoa beach, west of the city of Havana.”

The Cuban government presented irrefutable proof that the two planes were shot down over Cuban waters, including personal items from the four pilots and spotters on the planes and debris from the wreckage.

The Cuban government had solid reasons for taking decisive action to defend the country’s airspace. Murderous assaults organized by U.S.-based “civilians,” using “civilian” planes, boats, and small weapons, had taken the lives of many workers, farmers, and youth in Cuba ever since the country’s working people toppled the hated, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and made a socialist revolution.

Similar attacks organized from U.S. soil, with Washington’s complicity, have continued in the 30 years since then.

The most recent incident took place on February 25, 2026, when the Cuban coast guard fatally shot four men and wounded six others on a Florida-registered speedboat that had departed from the Miami area and entered Cuban territorial waters near Villa Clara province.

“The event is how it has been portrayed: an armed infiltration with terrorist goals, an infiltration financed and organized from within U.S. territory,” explained Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel in a March 13, 2026, interview. “As it was presented in the television report, they came heavily armed; therefore, that demonstrates their intentions and shatters the fallacy that certain Cuban counterrevolutionary right-wing characters are pushing, that they came in search of families…. In the investigations, [those captured] have all admitted their participation; they have all admitted that they fired, that they were the first to shoot at the boat of our Coast Guard, of our Border Guard.”

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