Cuba and Its Air Force Ordered to Pay $187.63 Million for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue Shootdown
After trial: The judgment was not reversed. In 1999 the Eleventh Circuit vacated only a garnishment against a separate Cuban telecommunications company, and in 2002 the families collected about $93 million from frozen Cuban assets, so the judgment was only partly paid.
Won by Greenberg Traurig, His own Miami firm, Podhurst Orseck and Podhurst Orseck PA.
After Cuban MiG fighters shot down two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes on February 24, 1996, killing four men, the families of three of the victims won a default judgment in Miami federal court. Judge James Lawrence King awarded $49.9 million in compensatory damages against Cuba and the Cuban Air Force and $137.7 million in punitive damages against the Air Force alone. The figure is a group result covering three families' separately itemized awards. The judgment stood, and about $93 million was later collected from frozen Cuban assets.
What happened
On the morning of February 24, 1996, two civilian Cessna 337 aircraft of the Miami-based group Brothers to the Rescue took off from Opa-locka Airport on a routine search for Cuban rafters in the Florida Straits. Carlos Costa flew one plane with Pablo Morales aboard. Mario de la Pena flew the other with Armando Alejandre as his passenger. Both crews radioed Havana before crossing the 24th parallel. Two Cuban MiG fighters, controlled from a military ground station, destroyed both planes with air-to-air missiles over international waters. All four men died, and no bodies were recovered.
Alejandre, 45, was a Vietnam veteran who consulted for the Metro-Dade Transit Authority and left a wife and a daughter. Costa, 29, trained staff at the Dade County Aviation Department and hoped to run airport operations. De la Pena, 24, was in his last semester at Embry-Riddle and had just landed an internship with American Airlines. The families of Alejandre, Costa and de la Pena sued the Republic of Cuba and the Cuban Air Force in federal court in Miami under a 1996 amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act that lets U.S. nationals sue terrorism-sponsoring states for extrajudicial killing. Morales, the fourth man, was not a U.S. citizen, and his family is not part of this judgment.
Cuba never answered the complaint, but the court still required proof. Judge James Lawrence King held a trial that ran about two and a half days, with the families presenting an economist, family testimony and the recorded radio traffic between the MiG pilots and their controllers. In the transcript the pilots ask for authorization to fire and are told to destroy the aircraft. Cuba, by then, had formally rejected the court's jurisdiction by diplomatic note.
On December 17, 1997, Judge King entered judgment against Cuba and the Cuban Air Force for $49,927,911 in compensatory damages: $17,532,913 for the Alejandre family, $16,130,704 for the Costa family and $16,264,294 for the de la Pena family. The awards combined lost lifetime earnings with pain and suffering and loss of companionship for the wives, parents and children who sued. He added $137.7 million in punitive damages against the Cuban Air Force alone, $45.9 million for each killing, because the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act bars punitive damages against a foreign state itself. The judge wrote that the shootdown had no precedent as a military aircraft deliberately destroying an unarmed civilian plane. This was the first trial under the new terrorism provision.
Frank Angones, who had known Alejandre since high school, was one of the lead lawyers for the families, working with lawyers from three firms. The opinion lists Roberto Martinez of Greenberg Traurig and Aaron Podhurst, Victor Diaz Jr. and Xavier Martinez of Podhurst Orseck as counsel for the plaintiffs. Collection took years. In 1999 the Eleventh Circuit vacated a garnishment of debts owed to a separate Cuban telephone company, holding it was not the Cuban government. In 2002, after Congress acted, the families collected about $93 million from frozen Cuban assets.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Alejandre v. Republic of Cuba, 996 F. Supp. 1239 (S.D. Fla. Dec. 17, 1997)·Archived copy
- 2.ABA Journal, 'Cuba on Trial', Oct. 1, 2007·Archived copy
- 3.ABA Journal, 'Q and A with Frank Angones', Oct. 1, 2007·Archived copy
- 4.Alejandre v. Telefonica Larga Distancia de Puerto Rico, 183 F.3d 1277 (11th Cir. 1999)·Archived copy
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