The indictment of Raúl Castro landed on Cuban Liberation Day, a date heavy with symbolism for exiles who have waited three decades for justice over the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.
Unlike his hawkish father, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence at the Allenwood minimum-security federal prison in Pennsylvania, when Congressman Rob Menendez, Jr. responded to the indictment of Cuban dictator Raúl Castro for his role in the 1996 downing of two Brothers to the Rescue planes, his words left some in his own community seething.
Menendez, Jr. called the indictment long overdue, but he warned against using it as cover for regime change.
“Real democratic reforms for Cuba must be enacted by the Cuban people, not by another illegal war,” said the New Jersey Democrat whose father, disgraced former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, reported to federal custody in June 2025 following his conviction on bribery, extortion, and acting as a foreign agent.
Federal prosecutors unsealed the criminal indictment against the former Cuban President for his alleged role in the February 24, 1996, downing of two planes operated by the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue. The charges include murder and the destruction of an airplane.
Cuban military aircraft shot down two unarmed civilian Cessna planes in international airspace, killing Pablo Morales, a lawful permanent resident, and three U.S. citizens—Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, and Mario de la Peña—who were on a humanitarian mission searching for Cuban rafters fleeing oppression across the Florida Straits.
In the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign against Havana — tightening sanctions, indicting Castro, positioning naval assets — the younger Menendez has emerged as an outlier.
He opposes military action outright. He has aligned with Democrats, introducing War Powers Resolutions to block unauthorized strikes, and he has refused to join the chorus of Cuban American lawmakers demanding belligerence.
That stance has not gone unnoticed in South Florida or Union City.
Some Cuban American advocacy groups and voters who once saw the Menendez name as synonymous with unyielding opposition to the Castro regime now express frustration. They want aggression.
They want the U.S. to finish what the Bay of Pigs started. And they see the younger Menendez as a break from his father’s legacy.
The Congressman’s father was for decades one of Congress’s most vociferous anti-Castro voices. He fought to keep Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list, opposed travel liberalization, and defended the embargo as an essential pressure.
His son represents the same diaspora constituencies but speaks a different language, both softer on the regime’s brutal 67 years of repression, and skeptical that American military force is the answer.
That distinction has cost him.
Inside the exile community, some hardliners demand isolation, not engagement.
They have condemned Democratic efforts to ease travel restrictions or remove the terrorism designation. They view any diplomatic opening as appeasement. And they worry that Menendez’s tone — careful, conditional, constitutional — is insufficiently aggressive.
The tension runs deeper than foreign policy.
A segment of the Cuban American electorate has grown disenchanted with political dynasties altogether.
The Menendez name carries baggage beyond Cuba. The elder senator’s corruption trial and resignation left wounds. And some voters see the younger Menendez as a product of New Jersey’s notoriously insular political machine — a coronation rather than a contest.
“Nepotism is an integral part of the political establishment,” said Ricardo Luis Rojas Estrada, a progressive organizer from Union City whose father was a political prisoner in Cuba. “We Latin people know nepotism’s stench.”
That critique blurs the lines between foreign policy and political legitimacy. But on Cuba policy itself, the divide is stark.
Across the aisle, hawks are circling. Sen. Lindsey Graham has declared that “the liberation of Cuba is upon us” and that after other operations, “Cuba is next.”
Reps. Carlos Giménez and Mario Diaz-Balart have cheered the prospect of the Cuban government’s fall.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself the son of Cuban exiles, has been central to negotiating what some describe as a potential U.S.-backed transition.
The Trump administration has offered $100 million in humanitarian aid conditioned on distribution through non-governmental groups and the Catholic Church.
Trump has also tightened an oil blockade, expanded internet access initiatives, and kept Cuba on the terrorism list.
Menendez has acknowledged the suffering. But he has also drawn a line.
“I have concerns about what the Trump Administration may do next,” the said in his May 21 statement. He does not believe the Castro indictment should be used to justify “an attempt at regime change akin to what we saw happen in Venezuela.”
For some exiles, that sounds like hesitation. For others, it sounds like the Constitution.
The War Powers Resolution was introduced by Reps. Gregory Meeks and Nydia Velázquez — which Menendez Jr. supports — cites the administration’s repeated threats, the Raúl Castro indictment, and the oil blockade as evidence that Trump is rushing toward an unauthorized war.
The resolution would terminate any military action against Cuba not explicitly approved by Congress.
However, the sentiment among Cubans is more complex: while the government is telling its citizens to prepare for war and rallying against a perceived invasion, recent polls suggest that the majority of residents on the island actually support U.S. military intervention as a desperate means to end prolonged economic suffering
“Donald Trump’s belligerent foreign policy is creating new wars and conflicts across the world,” Velázquez said.
Military analysts say a U.S. strike on Cuba would likely be a decapitation operation — commandos, cyberattacks, electronic warfare, precision strikes — not a beach landing. The Cuban military is old, underfueled, and outgunned.
But the island has spent 60 years preparing for exactly this scenario. Its “War of All the People” doctrine decentralizes resistance. Militias. Neighborhood networks. Leadership bunkers.
The harder problem, analysts say, is not taking down the defenses. It is what comes after.
Menendez has offered no action to back up his assertions about the Castro regime.
He claims he wants political prisoners freed. He says he wants the “oppressive grip lifted.” But he has staked himself to a position that, in the current climate, might cost him in tomorrow’s primary election.
That feels almost accidental — as if he did not expect his words to be scrutinized this closely, weighed against his father’s legacy, measured for insufficient fury.
But they have been. And in the exile halls of Miami and the machine corridors of New Jersey, the judgment is still out.
Critics noted the hypocrisy of the Castro indictment, given the ongoing illegal US bombing of boats that the Trump administration claims—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
The Cuban people must be the architects of their own freedom, the younger Menendez says. Whether that sounds like principle or passivity depends entirely on who is listening.
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