Raul Castro, from general to prisoner

By: Pedro Corzo - 31/05/2026

Guest columnist.
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I confess that few situations would please me more than seeing Raul Castro dressed in the orange uniform of common prisoners in the United States and serving the sentence imposed on him in a more rigorous prison, although I doubt that a US prison of those characteristics is more severe than the less malevolent Castro prisons.

During these sixty-seven years, there has been no shortage of Cuban scholars who emphatically affirm that the younger Castro executioner was the most organized, family-oriented, and even condescending compared to his brother, the greatest criminal in Cuban history, thankfully now deceased. And although I have no evidence to refute most of the labels they apply to him, I can assure you that he is not tolerant in the slightest because I remember with crystal clarity that one of the first photos of this individual, published in the first days of January 1959, shows him hanging a peasant in the heart of the Sierra Maestra during the days of the insurrection.

He then ordered hundreds of executions, including the massacre at Loma de San Juan, Santiago de Cuba, eleven days after the insurrection's triumph, in which 71 men were summarily executed in a single night. They even used bulldozers, in true Hitlerian style.

Raul was undoubtedly Fidel's most loyal servant. It's true that there have been stories of disagreements between the two autocrats, but even if they were true, the couple's shared interests prevailed, to the great misfortune of the Cuban people.

Raul Castro, the serial killer Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the “Butcher of Artemisa,” Ramiro Valdés, chose from the very first days of the revolutionary victory to assume the role of being the most intransigent defenders of the process led by Fidel Castro. This bloody triad, headed by the criminal Raul, were the leaders who, obeying the orders of the supreme leader, directed the spiritual and material destruction of a country that, with all its flaws, was at the forefront of many of the most important areas of development in Latin America.

I confess that I have not the faintest idea how the process against the man who gave the order to shoot down two unarmed planes flying in international waters with the sole objective of saving lives in danger can unfold. The former Minister of Defense of Cuba said, "I said, well, shoot them down in the sea when they appear and don't consult anyone," an expression very similar to that of Guevara who recommended to his henchmen, "Kill him, ask questions later," or another more institutional one from the serial killer, "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," from Ramiro Valdés. There are no expressions, only murders.

Unfortunately, the most numerous and horrendous crimes of Castro's totalitarian regime have been committed against the Cuban people within the country's borders. However, these crimes must be judged by their own citizens when the political situation in the country changes. For now, we must welcome the fact that the current United States government has decided to take legal action against a confessed murderer like Raul Castro, just as it did against the drug trafficker Nicolas Maduro, a crime that can also be attributed to the second-in-command in the destruction of Cuba.

According to a Miami Herald article, Raúl Castro met with Colombian drug traffickers in 1980 and authorized them to use Cuban ports for their drug trafficking to the United States in exchange for providing weapons and ammunition to the M-19 guerrillas. Years later, he met with one of Manuel Antonio Noriega's men to mediate a dispute the Panamanian general was having with Colombian drug traffickers.

Manuel de Beunza, a former major in the intelligence services of the Castro regime, testified at a Senate hearing in Washington that Raúl Castro ordered the replacement of Generoso Escudero as head of the naval unit in Cienfuegos because he refused to cooperate in the movement of speedboats transporting cocaine to the southern coast of Cuba. Furthermore, John Jairo "Popeye" Velásquez, a close associate of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, stated that the fugitive general maintained a close relationship with the Medellín cocaine cartel and protected drug shipments passing through Cuba en route to the southern coast of Florida.

Raul Castro has many crimes for which he can be tried by the United States.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».