The wire service has reprinted the 1996 dispatch, the same ink, the same names—Alejandre, de la Pena, Morales, Costas—as if the decades were merely an error in the filing. But this is not a reprint. It is a summons. You are indicted, Raúl. The pen that signed the flight orders has long since run dry, but the hand that held it has spent thirty years handling the salt, the cup, and the children’s books, and the hand has not been washed.
The Associated Press republished its own 29-year-old report on Saturday. The wire story, originally dispatched on February 25, 1996, by Nicole Winfield, documents how two Cuban MiG-23 fighter jets intercepted two civilian Cessna 337 Skymasters in international waters. The aircraft were flying on a filing that listed the Bahamas as their destination, though White House press secretary Mike McCurry and spokeswoman Mary Ellen Glynn clarified the flight plan was a south bound-and-return aimed at distributing supplies to refugees and searching the Straits for rafters. Four men were aboard the two planes: Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Pena, Pablo Morales, and Carlos Costas. The Coast Guard searched roughly eight miles north of Cuban waters, deploying a C-130 cargo plane, a helicopter, and two cutters from Key West. Petty Officer David French reported seeing two oil slicks. Officials reported no debris. Officials reported no survivors. President Bill Clinton condemned the downing of “two American civilian airplanes” and ordered the military to protect the search operations. The Cuban Interests Section in Washington offered no explanation. Jorge Mas Canosa of the Cuban American National Foundation called the strike an “act of war” against the United States. Thirty years later, the U.S. Justice Department is moving forward with the indictment of Raúl Castro for the murders.
Drink your coffee, Ramón. The four men are swimming. The Coast Guard finds nothing.
You are ninety-four years old and you are in a wheelchair. Your throat is thin. You have learned to sit still. But thirty years ago you gave the order, or you gave the voice that moved the two warplanes over the Straits, and you told them to strike two unarmed civilian planes. The decision-making architecture—the machinery that transformed “shoot them down” into the physical dispersal of four men into the Straits of Florida—is the mechanism for which you are now under indictment. The interception was not a military engagement; it was a bureaucratic process, the kinetic removal of an obstacle that had been dropping pamphlets and bread to rafters. You told your officials it was a threat to sovereignty, and the law became one thing for the men who rule islands and another thing for the men who fly Cessnas.
You picture your family safe in La Habana while Armando Alejandre’s hands are white on the yoke. You picture your grandchildren sleeping while Pablo Morales’s lungs are filling with salt water that does not stop because you have decided to call it a border defense. Your throat closes when you read the indictment, even though you do not know how to speak it yet. The metallic taste under your tongue when you swallow your morning medicine is the taste of the moment you did not stop the guns. It does not leave. Mario de la Pena tried to swim. Carlos Costas tried to swim. The four men tried to swim. The two warplanes turned. The water off Havana was warm, and the bodies did not hit the surface with a sound that reached your office then, or reaches it now. Your order turned the sky into a slaughterhouse and the water into a coffin. The Coast Guard Petty Officer reported the oil slicks. Your diplomats in Washington knew nothing. Mirta Iglesias waited for her husband Arnaldo to return. He returned with the picture of what you had done, while you sat in your office and let the search run until it ran out of fuel.
The room where you give the order is warm, Ramón. The room where the four men went down into the dark is cold. The sea will give up its dead, the Book says, but the families are still waiting for what the sea does not return, and the law, unlike the sea, is designed to keep looking.
You are small, Ramón, with large hands on the lever, and you let four men drown in international waters to prove a point about maps. The hands that ordered the shootdown are now the hands that hold the retirement of a statesman, yet the accounts have been brought to the light. The records are unsealed. The history is not a relic. The indictment is not a reprint. The hand that signed the orders remains unwashed, and the pen, dry though it is, has produced a body of work that the prosecutors can read.
“Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” Matthew 25:45
The four men went into the dark. The Christ goes into the dark. Ramón, the wire story is old. The cup has not been washed. Smile for the cameras when the indictment is read. He is watching from the bottom.