The Precedent: Lesson Plan
A teaching guide for parents, teachers, and anyone reading the story with a curious child or student. The United States' indictment of Raúl Castro on 22 May 2026 is the third movement in a thirty-eight-year pattern: indict a foreign head of state in a Florida federal court, escalate diplomatically, and finally use military force to bring the defendant to trial in Miami. The pattern began with Manuel Noriega in 1988-92 and was reused with Nicolás Maduro in 2020-26. The question this lesson plan tries to help students think about is: under what conditions does an indictment become a war?
What the story is about
On Friday 22 May 2026, the United States Department of Justice indicted Cuba's 95-year-old former president Raúl Castro on charges of conspiring to murder American citizens, by ordering the 1996 shootdown of two Cuban-American civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits. Four American citizens were killed in that shootdown.
The indictment, by itself, is a piece of paper. Cuba is not going to extradite Raúl Castro to Miami. So the indictment is also a question: what is the United States planning to do about the fact that the defendant is sitting in Havana?
The same question was asked of Manuel Noriega in 1988 and of Nicolás Maduro in 2020. Both times the answer turned out to be: the United States military will bring the defendant to Florida.
The 1996 shootdown
Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate) was a Miami-based Cuban-American volunteer organisation, founded in 1991 by the Bay of Pigs veteran José Basulto, that flew small civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits looking for Cuban rafters trying to flee to the United States. By the mid-1990s the group had drifted from search-and-rescue work into more provocative activity: dropping anti-Castro leaflets over Havana, deliberately entering Cuban airspace. On 24 February 1996, three Cessna 337 Skymasters set off from Opa-locka airport in Miami. Two Cuban Air Force MiG-29 fighters intercepted them. The lead Cuban pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Pérez-Pérez, fired air-to-air missiles at two of the three Cessnas and destroyed them. Both planes were over international waters, nine and ten nautical miles outside Cuban airspace. Four men were killed: Carlos Costa (29), Mario de la Peña (24), Pablo Morales (29), and Armando Alejandre Jr. (45). All four were United States citizens. The third Cessna, piloted by Basulto, escaped.
The shootdown produced two immediate consequences. The first was the Helms-Burton Act, signed by President Bill Clinton on 12 March 1996, which codifies the United States economic embargo on Cuba into binding statute (rather than executive order), meaning no president can lift the embargo without congressional approval. Helms-Burton is the legal backbone of the United States' Cuba policy and is still in force thirty years later. The second was a long, slow, technical legal investigation by the United States Department of Justice into who in the Cuban command structure had ordered the shootdown. That investigation never closed. In May 2026 it produced its terminal product, a federal indictment of Raúl Castro, then Cuba's Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
The Noriega arc: the operational template
Manuel Antonio Noriega (1934-2017) was a Panamanian intelligence officer who rose through the ranks of the Panama Defence Forces in the 1970s as a paid CIA asset, and who became the de facto military ruler of Panama after the death of General Omar Torrijos in 1981. He was not technically president (he held the title Commander of the Panama Defence Forces) but he picked the presidents and the presidents did what he told them. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s he was a useful United States client: he passed intelligence on Cuban activity in Central America, he allowed United States Special Forces to use Panamanian territory for Contra training, and he made himself indispensable to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. He was also, in his other capacity, allowing Colombian cocaine to transit through Panama for the Medellín Cartel.
By 1986 the United States Justice Department had a clear evidentiary picture of his cocaine activity. By 1987 the political balance had tipped: the Iran-Contra scandal had broken, the Reagan administration's enthusiasm for unconventional Central American allies had cooled, and the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Narcotics held hearings in February 1988 that publicly aired the case against Noriega. On 4 February 1988 a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Florida (Miami) returned a twelve-count indictment against him on racketeering and drug-trafficking charges. The next day a second grand jury in Tampa returned related charges.
The indictment was unprecedented. No United States court had previously charged a sitting head of state of a foreign sovereign country for conduct undertaken while in office. The legal-realist question (could the United States actually bring this defendant to trial?) was not answered for almost two years. What happened in the intervening twenty-three months was a sequence of escalating measures designed to make Noriega's continued tenure impossible:
- March 1988: US sanctions; freezing of Panamanian government accounts in US banks.
- April 1988: US suspension of Panama Canal Treaty payments.
- May 1989: Panama's presidential election. Guillermo Endara, the opposition candidate, won by approximately three to one. Noriega nullified the result.
- October 1989: A coup attempt against Noriega by a faction of his own Panama Defence Forces failed. The Bush administration was widely criticised for not having actively supported the coup.
- 15 December 1989: Panama's National Assembly, in a session convened by Noriega, declared a "state of war" with the United States.
- 16 December 1989: Marine officer Robert Paz was shot and killed by Panama Defence Forces at a Panama City checkpoint.
- 20 December 1989: Operation Just Cause. Twenty-seven thousand US troops invaded Panama, of whom approximately thirteen thousand were already stationed in the country at US Southern Command bases. The fighting lasted five days. Twenty-three US troops were killed; estimates of Panamanian dead range from several hundred to several thousand, the majority civilians killed in the Chorrillo neighbourhood of Panama City during the assault on Noriega's headquarters.
- 24 December 1989: Noriega took refuge in the Vatican Embassy (Apostolic Nunciature) in Panama City. US Army psychological operations played rock music at maximum volume on speakers outside the embassy gates for ten days.
- 3 January 1990: The papal nuncio, Monsignor José Sebastián Laboa, persuaded Noriega to surrender. He was placed under arrest by US forces and flown to Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida.
- 1991-92: Noriega was tried in the Southern District of Florida before Judge William Hoeveler. On 9 April 1992 he was convicted on eight of the ten counts. He was sentenced to forty years, later reduced to seventeen.
It was the first time in United States history that a foreign head of state had been convicted by an American jury.
After serving his federal sentence Noriega was extradited to France in 2010 (where he had been convicted of money laundering in absentia in 1999), and from France to Panama in 2011 (where he had been convicted of the political murder of Hugo Spadafora in absentia in 1993). He died in a Panama City hospital on 29 May 2017, age 83.
The Maduro reuse
Twenty-eight years after the Noriega indictment, on 26 March 2020, the United States Department of Justice indicted Nicolás Maduro, then sitting President of Venezuela, on charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. The indictment was issued by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York. The State Department offered a fifteen-million-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest.
For nearly five years the indictment had no operational consequence. In the first week of January 2026 a United States Special Operations Forces detachment landed in the grounds of the Miraflores Palace in Caracas during a political-negotiation moment, seized Maduro, and exfiltrated him through Curaçao. He is currently being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami pending trial. The capture has been compared by Trump administration officials and by independent legal observers to the 1989-90 Noriega operation; the Council on Foreign Relations published a backgrounder titled "Maduro's Capture and International Law: The Noriega Precedent" shortly after the capture.
The Cuba differences
Cuba is not Panama. The differences matter:
| | Panama, 1989 | Cuba, 2026 | |---|---|---| | Population | ~2.5 million | ~11.3 million | | Geography | Isthmus, US bases inside the country | Island, no US bases | | Legal basis | 1903 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, US Canal Zone jurisdiction | None | | US military presence | ~13,000 troops already in-country | Zero | | Active military | ~16,000 PDF | ~50,000 FAR | | Defence doctrine | Personal-rule loyalty force | Territorial defence in depth since 1961 | | Defendant's current role | Head of state | Retired since 2021 | | Crime alleged | Ongoing drug trafficking | 30-year-old conspiracy to murder | | Removal produces a vacancy? | Yes | No |
The last United States amphibious assault in the Caribbean basin was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. That operation failed. The strategic, diplomatic, and historical weight of any future amphibious operation against Cuba would be enormous.
The current Cuban president
The actual President of Cuba is Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, a 65-year-old engineer from Santa Clara who succeeded Raúl Castro as President in 2018 and as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2021. He has never been indicted in a United States court. On the afternoon of 22 May 2026, hours after the indictment was unsealed, Díaz-Canel told a Havana audience that Cuba "has the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military assault," and that such an assault would "cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences."
The political-decapitation theory of regime change (remove the leader, the regime collapses) worked operationally against Noriega in Panama. It worked against Maduro in Venezuela in January 2026 because Maduro genuinely was the regime. It does not match Raúl Castro in the same way, because Raúl Castro has not held formal office since 2021 and has not run the day-to-day affairs of the Cuban government for considerably longer than that. A military operation to seize Castro would not produce a constitutional vacancy or transfer of power. What it would produce is anybody's guess.
Discussion questions
For an older student:
- The legal predicate. What is the point of indicting a 95-year-old retired head of state for a 30-year-old crime that the existing US-Cuba embargo policy has already responded to (via Helms-Burton in 1996)? Is the indictment a legal document or a political document?
- The Noriega precedent. Of all the things the United States did to Noriega between February 1988 and January 1990, which was the cause of his eventual capture: the indictment, the sanctions, the National Assembly declaration of war, the death of the Marine, or some combination? What does the answer suggest about how the Castro indictment fits into a sequence?
- The Maduro template. The January 2026 special-forces operation in Caracas was a covert action conducted against a country with a functioning military. Why did it succeed where the Bay of Pigs in 1961 failed? Is the difference about the operation, the target, or the political conditions?
- The Bay of Pigs reference. The story argues that any future amphibious operation against Cuba would invoke the Bay of Pigs. Is the comparison fair? What is different about 2026 from 1961, and what is the same?
- The unindicted president. The indictment is against Raúl Castro, who is 95 and retired. The actual Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is 65 and has not been indicted. What does that tell you about what the United States Department of Justice was trying to do?
A note on the politics
This story does not take a side on whether the United States should or should not pursue military intervention in Cuba. It documents the pattern: indictment, escalation, military operation, Miami trial. The pattern has been used twice. It is being used a third time. The question of whether the third use will follow the same arc is the question this story exists to ask.
Further reading
For older students or interested readers:
- John Dinges, Our Man in Panama: How General Noriega Used the United States and Made Millions in Drugs and Arms (Random House, 1990).
- Frederick Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affair with Noriega (Putnam, 1990).
- National Security Archive, Cuba: Declassified Records on the Brothers to the Rescue Shootdown (19 May 2026).
- Council on Foreign Relations, Maduro's Capture and International Law: The Noriega Precedent (expert brief).
- William Hoeveler, United States v. Noriega, 746 F. Supp. 1506 (S.D. Fla. 1990) (the legal opinion that resolved the head-of-state immunity question).
Time Rhymes will publish a follow-up if and when the Cuba situation moves into its operational phase.