The Justice Department indicted de facto Cuban leader Raul Castro this week over the 1996 killings of four Americans. The indictment shows that the Trump administration wants to pressure Castro’s communist regime and to lay a legal foundation for any future U.S. military raid to capture him.Castro will certainly fear that a U.S. special operations team will soon come knocking down his door. After all, former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was captured by Delta Force barely a week after he was indicted. Yet, such a raid would be far more complicated with Castro than it was with Maduro.At first look, this greater challenge seems counterintuitive. The U.S. military base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay offers a forward staging area and defensible stronghold to support any raid. The proximity of Florida to Cuba would also facilitate the flexible use of air power. The decrepit nature of Cuba’s electronic warfare and air defense networks also reduces its means of resisting the U.S. military. If China were foolish enough to allow Cuba to use its electronic warfare station on the island, that station would quickly be destroyed.
Still, while these factors would certainly assist in any full-scale American invasion of the island, they do not eliminate the very real challenges confronting any Castro capture operation.
