Brothers to the Rescue

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Cuba is 145 km south of the US state Florida .

Brothers to the Rescue ( Spanish : Hermanos al Rescate , German : Brothers for Rescue , BTTR) was a Miami- based pilot volunteer organization founded in 1991 by the Cuban exile José Basulto , which was active until 2003. The founding purpose and main activity of the group was to support Cuban boat refugees through discovery and help from the air.

When significantly fewer Cubans chose the life-threatening escape route due to new US immigration rules from 1995 onwards, the Brothers to the Rescue drew attention to themselves through provocations by the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, which they rejected politically, and above all by leafleting with high publicity, sometimes in violation of Cuban airspace . In February 1996, two unarmed civil aircraft of the Brothers to the Rescue were shot down in international airspace by two Cuban air defense fighter jets and the four occupants were killed. According to an international investigation, Cuba was convicted by the United Nations for being shot down. The incident worsened relations between Cuba and the United States .

activities

In the first few years, the group actively rescued Cuban refugees who tried to cross with self-built rafts or boats. They are credited with helping to rescue over 4200 Cubans who fled their country in around 2500 flight missions within 13 years. The new wet foot / dry foot policy introduced in 1995 , which meant that refugees picked up by the US Coast Guard on the open sea were transported back to Cuba, deprived the pilots of the basis: if they discovered boat refugees, they could only rescue them from distress at sea, but no longer help you arrive successfully. According to Basulto, the Brothers to the Rescue did not see any other boat refugees at sea between August 1995 and March 1996. Since the group was strongly dependent on donations for refugees, their revenues were then sharply: 1,15 million dollars in 1994 to just 320,455 US dollars a year later.

As a result, the group shifted the focus of its activities. In their most spectacular action, the Brothers to the Rescue dropped thousands of leaflets in July 1995 and again in January 1996, which landed in Havana , the contents of which were directed against the Cuban government. According to Basulto, the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was printed on them. Compared to previous years, they carried out far fewer searches for boat refugees in need. In 1999 Basulto declared: "Our main goals are to overthrow communist tyranny and establish a democratic system, using confrontational methods in a non-violent strategy." Fidel Castro called the Brothers to the Rescue a "terrorist mafia organization". In 2003 the group stopped their flights for lack of money.

Brothers to the Rescue was a volunteer organization that consisted predominantly of sport pilots and was composed of members from 17 nations. The group had had a total of six aircraft of its own since 1991. The last of these, Basulto sold the Cessna in November 2008 , in which he had escaped being shot down by Cuban military fighter jets in February 1996, to a Cuban businessman in exile as a historical souvenir. He donated the purchase price of 100,000 US dollars to an aid project organized by Catholic nuns for the benefit of victims of the particularly destructive hurricanes Gustav and Ike in Cuba and Haiti .

The plane shot down in 1996

This map shows the southernmost position prior to the incident, according to US and Cuban data.
This map shows the location of the kills. Since the Cuban and US data contradict each other, the ICAO determined the most likely position based on the information from the ship "Majesty of the Seas".

On February 24, 1996, two Cuban military jets, a MiG-23 and a MiG-29 , shot down two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. The pilots Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales were killed. A third machine, flown by José Basulto, was also pursued but escaped without fire. The aircraft were unarmed Cessna 337s , a twin-engine, civilian light aircraft .

The investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization

The incident was investigated in detail at the request of the United States in the UN Security Council and with Cuba's consent by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The final report made the following findings:

  • The downing of civil aircraft was condemned as incompatible with basic rules of humanity and the usual rules of international aviation.
  • The two aircraft were shot down 9 and 10 nautical miles outside Cuban airspace. In view of the significantly different position information provided by the Cuban and US authorities, the investigators determined the shooting location with the help of data from two ships that were in the immediate vicinity and observations made by their crews and passengers.
  • In disregard of international air traffic regulations, Cuba had neither attempted to call the civil aircraft to change course by radio, nor to lead them out of the relevant airspace after being intercepted by the fighter pilots or to induce them to land on a certain airfield.

The ICAO report also reconstructed the history of the launch. He documented the following events:

  • Cuba had informed the US of multiple violations of its 12-mile zone (about 22 kilometers) by US aircraft since May 1994 and repeatedly called for measures to prevent further airspace violations, which the US was obliged to take.
  • After a low-level flight over Havana combined with leaflets, Cuba announced publicly in July 1995 that future violators of Cuban airspace could be shot down.
  • In January 1996, leaflets landed in Havana again which, according to the pilot, had been dropped outside of Cuban airspace and reached their destination with the wind. According to Cuban information, two aircraft had penetrated Cuban airspace.
  • The US authorities had warned in public statements and directly to José Basulto of the consequences of unauthorized entry into Cuban airspace and initiated legal action against Basulto.
  • After the leaflets were dropped in January, the head of the Cuban air defense was authorized by the government to make personal decisions about military intervention and shooting down to prevent similar actions.
  • The United States Department of State had informed those responsible for civil and military air movements about the possibility of unauthorized flights by the Brothers to the Rescue and, in view of sanctions, requested documentation of any violations of Cuban airspace.
  • Contrary to their previously stored flight plans, the pilots of the three aircraft flew on February 24, 1996 in the airspaces defined by Cuba as danger zones.

Condemnation of Cuba by the United Nations

In its declaration on the adoption of the investigation report, the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization condemned the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight as incompatible with elementary considerations of humanity and international law. He also noted, however, that every state had to effectively prohibit the deliberate use of civil aircraft licensed in its area of ​​responsibility for objectives contrary to the principles of civil aviation.

The Cuban government rejected the report's key statements on the grounds that the US obstructed the investigation and falsified data. She insisted on the allegation, refuted by testimony in the ICAO report, that the downing took place in Cuban airspace and took the questionable view that the aircraft did not have the status of civil aircraft.

Based on the ICAO report, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1067 in July 1996, condemning the shooting down and calling on Cuba to comply with international aviation rules (13 members approved the resolution, Russia and the People's Republic of China abstained) .

more details

Two of the three planes flying that day were shot down. The third one with Basulto on board was also intercepted and released for launch. Two Cuban Air Force MiG-23s attempted to chase it north while it was flying. Based on records and Basulto known position they pursued it until the 24th latitude and even into US airspace, before the mission was aborted because the Cuban leaders the risk realized too far north to fly in the airspace of the United States to penetrate. According to the US military, the fact that none of the US Air Force F-15s ascended is due to a "communication failure". According to the indictment filed against the Cuban fighter pilots and their commander in 2003, the Cuban double agent Juan Pablo Roque, active in Brothers to the Rescue, had previously informed the FBI that the organization had no flights planned for the weekend of February 24, 1996. However, he passed on the information about the planned flights to his Cuban clients.

The efforts of the US State Department, identified in the ICAO report, to dissuade the BTTR from violating Cuban airspace, were in connection with confidential negotiations between the Clinton administration and the Castro administration aimed at easing relations between Washington and Havana - a policy that was vehemently rejected by the leaders of the Cuban exile community. The then governor of the state of New Mexico and confidante of the president , Bill Richardson , had met with Fidel Castro several times since the end of 1995 and on February 10, 1996 in Havana in exchange for the departure of political prisoners from Cuba requested by the USA Airspace violations by the Brothers to the Rescue, which Clinton had previously commissioned Transport Secretary Federico Peña to be responsible for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On the same day, Richardson accompanied three liberated Cuban opposition activists from Havana to Miami, but the provocative BTTR flights were not effectively controlled. Statements by various US officials in court proceedings, parliamentary hearings and e. Internal letters, some of which were only disclosed in 2011, suggest several conclusions as to why the provocative flights were not stopped despite the instructions of President Clinton:

  • The authorities responsible for the implementation were not clear about the legal means by which to stop the flights. B. the Cuban information was not followed up in time and no documentation of violations of the Cuban airspace was created.
  • Not all pilots in the group had been warned by the authorities about the risk posed by the airspace violations, and José Basulto, the head of the BTTR, deliberately ignored such warnings instead of passing them on to the members of his group.
  • Very few employees of the various US authorities involved in the issue or members of the BTTR thought it was possible, despite the Cuban warnings, that Cuba would actually shoot down unarmed civil aircraft.

Political observers suspect that the two planes were not shot down by accident on that day. On the same day, the first national meeting of the dissident organization Concilio Cubano was to take place in Cuba . The Cuban government had the opportunity to brand the opposition as “agents of US imperialism” and to justify their persecution. On the part of Cuba, part of the responsibility was vigorously rejected.

Significance for the espionage process against the "Miami Five"

The shooting was the subject of proceedings in 2001 involving the “ Miami Five ”, five members of the Cuban agent ring “Red Avispa”, which was discovered in 1998 and who had infiltrated the Brothers to the Rescue and reported information about planned flights to Cuba. The main defendant and head of the network, Gerardo Hernández, was u. a. Sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiracy to murder the four BTTR pilots. The fact that the ICAO had denied the location of the launch as being outside of Cuban airspace was important for the murder. The planes were both shot down in close proximity to the Tri-Liner fishing boat. Plumes of smoke from the launch were filmed from the cruise ship “ Majesty of the Seas ”. According to their GPS navigation systems, both ships were not in Cuban waters. The captains and several crew members testified under oath about the position of their ships and what they saw that day.

The jury in the Miami Five trial found that the leader of the Red Avispa agent ring , Gerardo Hernández, had received encrypted radio messages warning agents Juan Pablo Roque and René González, who had been smuggled into Brothers to the Rescue, not to take action between the 24 . and 27 February to participate in flights of the organization. In the event that this cannot be avoided, they should speak coded slogans via radio for identification.

During the trial, José Basulto was also heard as a witness. a. reported on his past as a CIA- trained participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion and on a grenade attack he carried out on a Cuban hotel in 1962. An FAA official testified that in the summer of 1995, Basulto responded negatively to an outspoken warning of a possible shooting down: "You must understand, I have a life mission to serve." Basulto later stated that he viewed the group's activities as a species civil disobedience against the Cuban regime and as evidence that such disobedience is possible.

International reactions to the kill

United States

In the United States, the incident generated widespread and harsh condemnation of Cuba. The co-founder and director of the Cuban American National Foundation , Jorge Mas Canosa , condemned the incident as an act of war by the Castro administration against the United States. President Bill Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act passed by Congress but previously rejected , which significantly tightened the economic embargo against Cuba .

The surviving dependents of the three US citizens of Cuban descent received a total of US $ 187 million in reparation payments from a US court in December 1997, of which US $ 58 million was paid out four years later from accounts of the Cuban government frozen in the US. Since the fourth victim was a Cuban citizen, his survivors had no opportunity to sue the Cuban state in a US court. However, the families of the other three victims ceded $ 3 million from their own compensation payments.

Cuba

Fidel Castro described the downing of the planes in a Time interview immediately after the incident "as an unavoidable necessity [...] although it was known that the USA would politically exploit this."

Miguel Alfonso Martínez of the Cuban Foreign Ministry said in an interview that aircraft belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue had violated Cuban airspace 25 times in the past 20 months. He asked, “What would happen if an unidentified aircraft, or even an identified one, flown by a declared enemy of the US, flew over Washington? What would US officials do? Would you allow the flight to continue undisturbed? "

Martínez also said the two planes downed were "not ordinary civil aircraft," as claimed by the US side. "This is not the case of an innocent civil aviator who, because his instruments failed, left his designated air corridor and strayed into the airspace of a foreign country." "These people knew what they were doing. You were warned. They wanted to take various actions that were clearly designed to destabilize the Cuban government, and US officials were aware of their intentions. "

The Juan Pablo Roque case

One of the pilots in the group was Cuban sleeper agent Juan Pablo Roque , a former MiG pilot. He left the group unexpectedly on February 23, 1996, exactly one day before the aircraft were shot down, and disappeared to Havana , where he condemned the Brothers to the Rescue. Roque was a former major in the Cuban Air Force and claimed to have fled Cuba four years earlier. As a result, he was quickly hired by the Brothers to the Rescue, for whom he flew several missions.

Roque denied working for the Cuban government. He said he had returned home because he no longer agreed with the methods of the Brothers to the Rescue. He also spoke of plans to attack military bases in Cuba and to shut down national defense communications structures. On February 26, 1996, Roque appeared on Cuban television where he branded the Brothers to the Rescue as an illegal, anti-Cuban organization whose primary aim was to provoke incidents likely to further the relations between Cuba and the United States to worsen. In an interview with the ICAO , he said that the group had planned to transport anti-personnel weapons to Cuba and destroy high-voltage lines in order to cut off electricity in Cuba.

During his time in Miami , Roque was in constant contact with the FBI and was also paid by them. Roque's statements raised questions about the role of some agencies, notably the FBI and the CIA , in their role in the activities of Cuban exiles . A White House spokesman , however, denied any relationship between North American intelligence services and the Brothers to the Rescue, while stressing that the group is not a front organization of these services and is not paid by them.

Roque's wife, who was left behind in Florida in February 1996 and who sees herself as a victim of fraud by the Cuban secret service, was awarded US $ 27.1 million in a 2001 trial against the Cuban government for psychological and physical trauma. However, she subsequently received only a fraction of the amount.

literature

Web links

  • Shoot Down Documentary from 2007 about the shooting down, co-produced by the niece of one of the four victims
  • Hermanos al Rescate Documentary by Horacio Cambeiro, USA 2011 (English / Spanish)
  • América TV (Miami): A Mano Limpia ( Memento from October 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Broadcast about Brothers to the Rescue, u. a. with José Basulto, from February 22, 2011, via YouTube, accessed on September 19, 2011 (Spanish)
  • Carlos Widmann : Das Gewächte des Feindes, in: Der Spiegel, March 4, 1996, accessed on January 3, 2013

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Last Brothers to Rescue plane sold for hurricane relief ( Memento of the original from October 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Miami Herald of November 18, 2008, accessed via Cuba Study Group on September 19, 2011 (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cubastudygroup.org
  2. ^ I-Team: Docs Show Cuban Shoot Down Was Expected CBS Miami from November 29, 2009, accessed on September 20, 2011 (English)
  3. ↑ a b c d e Basulto testifies on role as anti-Castro operative in: Miami Herald of March 13, 2001, via LatinAmericanStudies.org, accessed on September 19, 2011 (English)
  4. ↑ José Basulto: The plane that foiled Castro's plot accessed on September 18, 2011 (English)
  5. ↑ a b Hermanos al rescate in: La Nación (Buenos Aires) of January 3, 1999, accessed on September 19, 2011 (Spanish)
  6. ↑ Fidel Castro: The ominous idea is to provoke an armed conflict between Cuba and the USA ( memento of the original from October 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Speech of March 25, 2003 in: Granma (German edition), accessed on September 20, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.granma.cu
  7. ↑ Florida: Cuban Exile Group Halts Flights in: New York Times, February 6, 2003, accessed September 20, 2011
  8. ↑ a b United Nations: Report on the shooting down of two US-registered private civil aircraft by Cuban military aircraft on 24 February 1996 ( Memento of the original dated December 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 12.3 MB) ICAO report from June 20, 1996, accessed on September 20, 2011 (English) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.undemocracy.com
  9. ↑ a b c ICAO: Press release and conclusions of the ICAO Council on the report on the downing of civil aircraft, dated June 28, 1996, accessed on September 15, 2011 (English)
  10. ↑ United Nations: Shooting down of two civil aircraft on February 24, 1996 (PDF; 52 kB) Minutes of the negotiations of the Security Council, accessed on September 20, 2011 (English)
  11. ↑ United Nations: Security Council Resolution 1067 (PDF; 2.2 MB) of July 26, 1996 (pp. 93–95), accessed on September 19, 2011
  12. ↑ a b Cuban pilots charged with murder  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: CNN.com of August 22, 2003, accessed September 19, 2011@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / articles.cnn.com  
  13. ↑ Travels with Bill on the website of Richardson's former foreign policy advisor Peter Bourne, accessed September 19, 2011 (English)
  14. ↑ Florida: Lawmaker Obtains 3 Cubans' Freedom in: Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1996, accessed September 19, 2011
  15. ↑ Fidel Castro: Submission to Imperial Politics, column of August 27, 2007, in the German-language Fidel Castro archive, accessed on September 20, 2011
  16. ↑ s. also Carl Nagin: Annals of Diplomacy: Backfire in: New Yorker from January 26, 1998 (English, online access for a fee)
  17. ^ I-Team: Secrets Behind The Shootdown On Its 15th Anniversary with links to further documents, CBS Miami February 24, 2011, accessed on September 20, 2011 (English)
  18. ↑ The Shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue: What Happened? Minutes of the hearing in the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Relations on September 18, 1996, accessed September 20, 2011
  19. ^ A b Bert Hoffmann: Foreign Policy, International Relations and Relations with the USA , in: Ette / Franzbach: Kuba heute, page 169 f.
  20. ↑ Convicted Cuban spy says he had no role in shoot-down ( Memento of the original from August 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Miami Herald of March 22, 2011, accessed September 19, 2011 (English)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.miamiherald.com
  21. ↑ a b c U.S. Tightens Sanctions Against Cuba After Downing Of Two Exile Planes Off Cuban Coast In: NotiSur - Latin American Political Affairs ISSN 1060-4189 , Volume 6, Number 9 March 1, 1996 Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2003 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ssdc.ucsd.edu
  22. ↑ "The Cuban Downing of the Planes. The News We Haven't Been Hearing ...." Article from Cuban Solidarity Net ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cubasolidarity.net
  23. ↑ Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque's jilted ex-wife won $ 27 million for his deception in: Miami New Times of April 1, 2010, accessed September 19, 2011 (English)
  24. ↑ Homepage of Ana Margarita Martinez (Roque's abandoned wife) with numerous links to other articles, accessed on September 19, 2011 (English)