Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Cuba, and Why Food Banks Are Getting Squeezed
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I'm Debra Kamen. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. What I do is I look at the people running the real estate industry, who for so many years have been relatively invisible. And the more that I look into it, the more that I find there are people in the real estate industry operating unethically. And their unethical behavior affects every single American. At The New York Times, we're always looking a little bit deeper to help readers better understand the world. You can subscribe to The New York Times at nytimes.com slash subscribe.
From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, May 21st. Here's what we're covering.
Today, we are announcing an indictment charging Raul Castro and several others with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals.
The Department of Justice has announced charges against the former president of Cuba, 94-year-old Raul Castro, in a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration's pressure campaign against the country.
If you kill Americans, we will pursue you, no matter who you are, no matter what title you hold, and in this case, no matter how much time has passed.
Raul Castro, who's the brother of Fidel, was charged in connection with a deadly incident back in 1996. That year, the Cuban military shot down a pair of American planes operated by an exile group that often scoured the Caribbean. looking for Cubans who were trying to flee the communist regime. Four U.S. citizens were killed, and for decades, family members of the victims and others called for Castro to be held responsible. Now the indictment comes as President Trump has openly said he wants to topple the Cuban government. In a press conference announcing the charges, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch said a warrant has been issued for Castro's arrest.
So we expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way. This is a major development, frankly, because it has clear echoes of the indictment by the U.S. Justice Department of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro.
My colleague Michael Crowley covers U.S. foreign policy. He says the Maduro indictment became the basis for the White House to send troops into Venezuela and seize the leader. And when it comes to Cuba, Trump has already been saying the U.S. could take over the island. Michael says one driving force behind Trump's aggressive stance is his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
Rubio grew up and started his political career in South Florida, where the influence of anti-Castro regime Cuban exiles is enormous. And as a United States senator, there may have been no one as outspoken and determined as Rubio in calling for dramatic change in Cuba, including the fall of the Cuban regime, which he has often described as a dictatorship. And even if President Trump doesn't feel nearly as emotionally invested in Cuba as Marco Rubio does, Trump loves to be able to say that he has done things or solved problems that his predecessors weren't able to do. And if President Trump is able to achieve dramatic change in Cuba, possibly getting rid of the communist regime that has been there since 1959, I think he would be very, very happy to brag about that achievement that other presidents were not able to accomplish.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Cuba, news of Raul Castro's indictment trickled out slowly, in part because of widespread blackouts made worse by President Trump's effective fuel embargo on the country. Facing those power outages, along with growing hunger and a health care crisis, some Cubans say they would welcome an intervention, even a military one, if it would break the status quo. At the same time, Cuba's ambassador to the UN said in an interview that the country is eager to continue negotiations with the U.S. about changing its economy and government. But that, quote, building different pretexts for military aggression does not help. Now, two quick updates on stories we've been covering. First, new campaign finance documents show that just before the White House rolled out a policy that could be lucrative for the tobacco industry, a major tobacco company donated $5 million to a Trump-backed super PAC.
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