The federal indictment of Raúl Castro on decades-old charges is just the latest escalation in a long-running US campaign to justify invading Cuba.

The case against the 95-year-old former Cuban president — based on his alleged involvement in the downing of two planes in 1996 — comes in a year of intensified anti-Cuban policy that has steadily built since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s first term.

For many on the island, the Obama presidency had felt like a real turning point in US-Cuban relations.

“The Cuba of 2015, 2016, was quite different than the Cuba we are living in now,” Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist at the US-based news outlet Belly of the Beast, tells In These Times and Foreign Policy in Focus. “For the first time in my life my friends weren’t thinking of leaving Cuba in order to have a better future.”

The Obama administration’s steps toward normalization, underscored by the restoration of diplomatic ties and an easing of the blockade between 2014 and 2016, didn’t last long though. The first Trump administration not only rolled back progress made under Obama, but actually tightened the sanctions regime even further.

Under Trump, Cuba was re-added to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, which imposes penalties on other countries that trade with the island nation. US diplomatic personnel were pulled out of the US embassy in Cuba following baseless conspiracies about “Havana Syndrome.” And perhaps most damagingly, Trump lifted the suspension of Title III of the Helms Burton Act.

This last move opened the floodgates for Americans who had claims to property nationalized after the 1959 Cuban Revolution to sue companies for doing business on that property, hamstringing the economy even further.

“That scared a lot of people,” Oliva Fernández says.

The election of President Joe Biden did not change things, even though he had been a central player in the Obama White House. Biden’s feeble effort to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism — less than a week before Trump was re-inaugurated — is emblematic of an administration that did too little, too late.

“Biden didn’t do anything, he didn’t lift a finger,” Oliva Fernández says. “There was no difference between Trump and Biden policy on Cuba.”

Trump’s second term has taken America’s anti-Cuba policies even further.

In January, the administration declared the Cuban government posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. This designation, based on familiar yet baseless accusations of collusion with Russia, China, Hamas, and Hezbollah, has been devastating for the island because it created a secondary tariff system against any country selling or providing oil to Cuba.

In the six months since that executive order, only one tanker — the Russian ship Anatoly Kolodkin — has delivered fuel to Cuba. Over that period of time, the people of Cuba have dealt with rolling blackouts and a near collapse of the nation’s healthcare system.

In May, another executive order by President Trump imposed new sanctions targeting foreign individuals and businesses that engage with Cuba economically.

Then came the indictment against Raúl Castro, which Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche implied could be enforced by the US military. That threat carries more weight after the illegal US capture of President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela early this........

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