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By Hira Humayun, CNN

(CNN) — Former Cuban leader Raul Castro has been indicted for his alleged role in the shooting down of two civilian planes 30 years ago that killed three Americans and sent US-Cuba relations plunging.

Here’s what you need to know about the deadly incident.

What happened?

In the 1990s, a Miami-based volunteer organization called Brothers to the Rescue carried out regular flights attempting to find and assist Cubans trying to sail to the US.

On one such mission, on February 24, 1996, Cuban forces shot down two of their planes near to the Cuban coast, destroying them with heat-seeking missiles, according to Congress documents. Three American citizens and one resident of the US were killed. A third Brothers aircraft escaped.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the Cuban government accused Brothers to the Rescue of engaging in covert operations against the regime – allegations the US swiftly denied.

According to the US government, the Brothers to the Rescue planes were unarmed and the volunteers aboard posed no threat to the Cuban government, military or population.

On Tuesday, Cuba’s embassy in the US took to X saying the “violations of Cuban airspace” were not isolated incidents but among “more than 25 serious, deliberate and systematic violations.”

“These were not miscalculations, but rather a continuous campaign that jeopardized international aeronautical safety,” the embassy said.

Who are Brothers to the Rescue?

Brothers to the Rescue, which is no longer active, has in the past described itself as a pro-democracy humanitarian group dedicated to helping Cuban people free themselves from dictatorship, using nonviolent means.

The volunteer activist group was founded in May 1991 by anti-regime Cuban exile Jose Basulto, who was on the plane that escaped, and made up of Cuban American pilots flying out of Miami area airports. Its inception came after Cuban teenager Gregoria Perez Ricardo, who fled the communist-run island, died of severe dehydration while crossing the Florida Straits, according to the group.

They also dropped leaflets over Cuba criticizing the communist government of Fidel Castro, the country’s former revolutionary leader who made Cuba the first Communist country in the Western Hemisphere – and played a central role in the Cold War.

During the Fidel Castro dictatorship, arbitrary arrests, brutal crackdowns on dissent, beatings, intimidation, and surveillance were common. Many of those trying to flee the island – some on makeshift rafts – wouldn’t survive the perilous journey across the Florida Straits.

How did the US respond?

The US government swiftly condemned the shooting down of the two planes and just days later, President Bill Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act, also known as the Helms-Burton Act.

The act tightened sanctions on Cuba and remains the basis of US embargos on the country. Th

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By Jacopo Prisco, CNN

(CNN) — Nereid, Neptune’s third-largest moon, could be the only intact survivor from an ancient set of moons destroyed early in the solar system’s history, according to a new analysis based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Neptune, the eighth and most distant planet from the sun, stands out among the outer planets in our solar system for its odd group of moons. The other outer giants — Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter — all have a broadly similar, orderly set of satellites, with several larger moons orbiting in the same direction as the host planet’s rotation.

But Neptune has a far smaller and more chaotic collection of moons: Triton, Neptune’s largest satellite, dwarfs all the others and orbits in the opposite direction of its host’s rotation. It is the only large moon in the solar system to do so.

Astronomers suspect the reason for Triton’s odd behavior is that it didn’t originate from the remnants of Neptune’s formation, which would make it orbit in the same direction as that planet. They hypothesize instead that Triton might have originated from the Kuiper Belt, a ring-shaped region of icy bodies at the edge of the solar system, and entered the Neptunian environment over 4 billion years ago.

Previous studies have suggested that Triton may have been captured by Neptune’s gravity after a close pass and flung inward to smash into Neptune’s primordial satellite system.

If Neptune did have an original set of moons that more closely resembled those of its planetary neighbors, the arrival of Triton — which is just smaller than our own moon — would have wreaked havoc, crashing into the other satellites and annihilating some of them. The current features of Neptune’s system support this scenario, and its seven inner moons appear to be leftovers of this ancient clash.

But now, new research using data from the James Webb Space Telescope suggests that one object might have been entirely spared from the chaos.

“I think Nereid is the only intact survivor of this process,” said Matthew Belyakov, a graduate student in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and first author of a study on the subject published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“The other survivors are Neptune’s innermost moons, but they are not intact because we have images of them from Voyager, and they look like disrupted rubble piles. So they are surviving material from the initial system, but not fully intact moons.”

This hypothesis would upend previous assumptions that Nereid was, much like Triton and a few other Neptunian moons, a captured Kuiper Belt object, as the new James Webb data revealed that Nereid’s composition doesn’t match what scientists know about Kuiper Belt objects.

A pixilated image

Astronomers don’t know a lot about Nereid, because it is faint and distant from Earth and the sun. The only image scientists have of it is a blurry photo taken in 1989 by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft during its brief fly-by of Neptune. Nereid is the outermost of Neptune’s known moons, and it has one of the most eccentric (meaning noncircular) orbits in the solar system. It takes 360 Earth days for the moon to complete one lap around Neptune.

Named after the sea nymphs of Greek mythology, Nereid is believed to be around Read more

Por Rey Rodríguez, CNN en Español

El 16 de abril de 2021, Raúl Castro, entonces de 89 años y hermano del fallecido Fidel Castro, renunció como primer secretario del Partido Comunista de Cuba, la máxima posición de poder en la isla. En su lugar quedó el presidente Miguel Díaz-Canel, quien ha prometido preservar la revolución.

Ese día, durante su despedida en la clausura del VIII Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba, el también general de ejército advirtió que, mientras viviera, estaría listo, “con el pie en el estribo”, para defender la Cuba socialista.

El cambio generacional ponía fin a casi seis décadas del régimen de los Castro. Sin embargo, para muchos cubanos, Raúl ha seguido ejerciendo lo que consideran una especie de “poder en la sombra” y su presencia e influencia en la escena política del país siguen siendo palpables.

Raúl continúa participando, en ocasiones, en los actos centrales por el triunfo de la revolución cubana. Incluso llegó a recibir a algunos presidentes y líderes políticos de países aliados en el Palacio Nacional.

“El partido es solamente una fachada. Díaz-Canel no tiene poder ninguno; el poder lo tienen Raúl y las Fuerzas Armadas, que, además de tener los cañones, tienen las cuentas bancarias”, asegura Sebastián Arcos, director del Instituto de Investigaciones Cubanas de la Universidad Internacional de la Florida.

Antes de dejar su cargo de primer secretario del partido, Raúl dijo que se iba “con la satisfacción del deber cumplido” y que tenía confianza en el futuro del país.

Hoy, ese futuro es cada vez más incierto. Tras la captura del derrocado presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, en un operativo el pasado 3 de enero, el presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, cortó los envíos de petróleo venezolano a Cuba. Además, amagó con imponer aranceles a otros países que le vendieran crudo, lo que provocó en la isla la peor crisis energética de su historia reciente.

La última aparición pública de Raúl Castro fue el 15 de enero, cuando asistió al funeral de los 32 militares cubanos abatidos durante la captura de Maduro. Vestía uniforme militar y estuvo acompañado por el presidente de Cuba, así como por la cúpula del partido y del Ejército.

El pasado 13 de marzo, Díaz-Canel confirmó en una conferencia de prensa que las conversaciones sostenidas con Washington para buscar una solución al bloqueo impuesto a la isla habían sido dirigidas por Raúl y por él.

“Bajo la dirección del general del Ejército como líder histórico de nuestra revolución y la mía, y colegiado con las principales instancias del partido, el Gobierno y el Estado cubano, funcionarios cubanos sostuvieron recientemente conversaciones con representantes del gobierno de Estados Unidos”, dijo ese día.

El canciller de Cuba dijo que está “dispuesto a escuchar” la oferta de US$ 100 millones en ayuda humanitaria de Estados Unidos, aunque remarcó que no tiene detalles específicos sobre la propuesta del Departamento de Estado

Arcos señala que no es casualidad que Díaz-Canel haya mencionado primero a Castro que a sí mismo en aquel discurso de marzo. “Eso es rendir pleitesía al líder verdadero. Es decir, el presidente de Cuba y primer secretario del partido se coloca en segundo lugar”.

El exgobernante cubano no estuvo en ese evento, pero sí su nieto, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, conocido como el Cangrejo, quien apareció sentado en el recinto cerca de Díaz-Canel, según las imágenes trasmitidas por la televisión cubana.

“Raulito”, como también lo llaman en Cuba, había participado esa misma mañana en una reunión encabezada por el mandatario cubano junto con miembros del Partido Comunista y del Consejo de Ministros.

Hasta ahora se desconoce cuál es su rol oficial en el liderazgo de la isla. Sin embargo, semanas antes de que el Gobierno cubano confirmara el inicio de conversaciones con Washington, algunos medios public