Why do we continue to fail when analyzing Cuba’s role in the illicit networks that cross the Caribbean and Latin America?
In 1993, Raúl Castro was investigated for drug trafficking by a federal grand jury in Florida. This event, strangely forgotten, was documented in the press of the time, and years later, in the year 2000, it was treated in a audience of the United States Congress. However, despite the evidence, the investigation was shelved by Bill Clinton’s administration. For more than three decades the topic has been reduced to mere footnote mentions. A reduction that may be the key to understanding why we continue to fail when analyzing Cuba’s role in the illicit networks that cross the Caribbean and Latin America.
On April 8, 1993, Miami Herald revealed that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida had drafted a criminal indictment (draft indictment) that accused the Cuban government of being a criminal enterprise of racketeering (structural organized crime, under the US RICO law) and the Minister of the Armed Forces, Raúl Castro, as the head of a conspiracy aimed at sending tons of cocaine from Colombian cartels through Cuba to the United States. The document, the product of months of secret testimony before a grand jury, identified fifteen senior Cuban state officials as part of a conspiracy to facilitate the transit of cocaine from the Medellín cartel to the United States during the 1980s. Among the names were Raúl Castro, then minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, described by the newspaper as “the head of the conspiracy”, José Abrantes, Aberlado Colomé Ibarra, Manuel Piñeiro (Barba Roja), Nelson Blanco, Rosa María Abierno Gobín, among others, who included Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, who was shot after Cause 1, in 1989.
The draft attributed the movement of at least 7.5 tons of cocaine to that network. It described a scheme sustained over time, supported by the use of Cuban airspace, ports and maritime routes. The criminal hypothesis built after months of investigation, formulated by federal prosecutors, was solid enough to have been seriously considered as a formal accusation. However, the indictment It never arrived.
Miami Herald He then explained that filing an accusation of that caliber required direct approval from the Department of Justice. It was no ordinary case: it involved criminally charging an entire foreign government. Something that had recently happened with Manuel Noriega in Panama, indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami and Tampa in February 1988 on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and conspiracy, which led to his capture after the 1989 US invasion and his eventual conviction in the United States and France.
In Cuba, the Noriega precedent had had immediate repercussions: the summary trial against General Arnaldo Ochoa and other officers, known as Cause 1, was held in June 1989, six months after Noriega’s capture, culminated in the execution of four of the accused and served as a scapegoat for the Castros to escape the same fate. A purge designed to concentrate responsibilities in intermediate figures and shield the top leadership. Four years later, the investigation prepared by a federal grand jury in the southern district of Miami showed that the problem of drug trafficking in Cuba had not ended with the 1989 shootings, but had risen to the highest levels of power.
Since the early 1980s, various judicial testimonies in the United States had pointed out logistical contacts between the Medellín cartel and Cuban authorities. Carlos Lehder, co-founder of the cartel, declared that he had held direct meetings with Raúl Castro and had obtained facilities for the transit of shipments. Added to these statements were the regime’s well-known relations with guerrilla organizations in Central America with the FARC, the ELN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the Farabundo Martí Front, among others, a framework where ideology, political financing and illicit economies overlapped with disturbing normality.
In 2000, the case was taken up again in a audience of the United States Congress in which sufficient evidence was presented that added information to the 1993 investigation, which included, among others, Ileana de la Guardia, daughter of Antonio de la Guardia, one of those shot by Fidel Castro during Case 1. The question is not whether there was enough evidence, which there is, but whether the United States was willing to assume the political consequences of pursuing that accusation to the end. Evidently Bill Clinton’s administration was not.
Today, when the international debate focuses on accusations of drug trafficking against high-ranking Venezuelan officials and the notion of a “narco-state”, this precedent is inescapable. The case of Nicolás Maduro is often presented as an anomaly, a recent degeneration of power in Venezuela. But history suggests a continuity of practices, knowledge and control models that Cuba not only developed, but exported. As when a company outsources functions and processes outside its territory to reduce costs or evade legal implications: the Castro regime simply identified that it was more convenient to take operations outside its territory; the destination was Venezuela.
Since the early 2000s, Havana has maintained a deep and structural presence in the Venezuelan military, intelligence and security apparatus. This relationship is not limited to political and ideological cooperation. It involves transfer of methods, parallel chains of command and forms of power management where the line between what is state and what is illicit becomes deliberately blurred. Observed in the light of the 1993 investigation, it is increasingly difficult to maintain that Cuba has been a mere spectator of the rise of state drug trafficking in the region.
The silence then has had consequences. By not confronting the state dimension of Cuban drug trafficking in time, a model that would later find fertile ground in other countries was left intact. Three decades later, the Castro regime, creator and architect of the region’s drug trafficking networks, continues unpunished, which at the time survived the capture of Noriega, and today seeks to escape again after the capture of Maduro.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Citizenship and Freedom website. At the request of its author, it was republished in CubaNet.
