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.
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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.
For a start, this public indictment has removed the element of surprise that supported the Maduro raid. The importance of surprise in the successful conduct of military operations is nearly impossible to overestimate. In Venezuela, Delta Force was able to combine surprise with speed and violence of action to quickly overwhelm Maduro’s guards — many of whom were Cuban special forces operatives. Maduro, his military, and his bodyguards were effectively knocked out before they even knew what was happening. By the time that any relief force could be organized and deployed, Maduro was sitting handcuffed on a U.S. warship. In contrast, unless he has gone senile, Castro will now almost certainly be spending most of his days ensconced in one of the regime’s subterranean bunkers.
Those bunkers add significantly to the complexity of any raid.
Numerous subterranean bunkers were constructed on Fidel Castro’s orders in the 1980s. Ironically, some of these bunkers are likely located close to Guantanamo Bay in the heavily forested and mountainous Segundo Frente region, for example. These bunkers would likely neuter the acoustic weapons that were so successfully employed by Delta Force during the Maduro raid. The terrain enabling opportunities for concealment would also put U.S. helicopters in the line of fire for Cubans armed with Strela air-to-air missile systems.
Next, the raid team would have to get into the bunkers.
This would take time. Indeed, it might not even be possible without heavy equipment or airstrikes. And that time would be a potent enemy to any American force and an ally to Castro. It would entail a high risk of U.S. forces becoming outnumbered and surrounded by Cuban reinforcements. Mitigating this threat would thus require a significant cordon force of U.S. Army Rangers to protect the raid team. And while supporting U.S. air cover could provide the ground element some protection, it could not do so perfectly. A lot of Americans might well end up dying or being captured.
The U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command and Southern Command know all this, of course. Yes, Trump has a very high appetite for risk as compared to his recent predecessors. And yes, adaptability amid great challenges is a cherished tenet of JSOC. At the same time, no one wants an Operation Eagle Claw-style disaster that only emboldens the Cuban regime. Put simply, while the U.S. could capture Castro, doing so would be far from easy.
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There’s one final point worth noting. Considering that Trump will have been briefed on all this, and on the ideological unity of the Cuban regime, its excellent intelligence service, and the better units of the Cuban military, perhaps this indictment is only a distraction.
Perhaps what we’re really seeing here is Trump building momentum toward an invasion.
