Federal prosecutors are reportedly moving to indict 94-year-old former Cuban dictator Raúl Castro for his role in the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft over the Florida Straits that killed four Americans. Thirty years. It took thirty years for someone in Washington to decide that murdering U.S. citizens from the cockpit of a MiG fighter jet should maybe have legal consequences.

Better late than never, I suppose — though I'm sure the families of those four dead Americans might have preferred "on time."

Here's what happened, for those of you who were busy being born or paying attention to things other than communist atrocities in 1996. Brothers to the Rescue was a humanitarian group that flew small civilian planes over the Florida Straits searching for Cuban rafters — desperate people fleeing Castro's island prison, trying to reach the United States. On February 24, 1996, Cuban Air Force MiG jets blew two of those planes out of the sky. Four people died. The planes were unarmed. The mission was humanitarian. And Cuba's response was essentially: so what?

And for 30 years, that's exactly how Washington treated it too. So what.

Administration after administration played footsie with the Castro regime. Obama literally opened an embassy in Havana and acted like he'd brokered peace in the Middle East. Nobody — not one president — had the spine to say "you killed Americans and you're going to answer for it" until now.

As RedState reported, the indictment still needs grand jury approval, but the signal from the Trump administration is unmistakable. President Trump has already signed an executive order designating Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat," cut off their oil supply, and threatened tariffs on any country that dares keep exporting oil to the island.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis didn't mince words when the news broke. "Let 'er rip, it's been a long time coming!" he posted on May 15th. That's about as succinct as it gets, and he's right.

And it's not just Raúl they're looking at. His grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro — nicknamed "Raulito" — is a Ministry of the Interior official who apparently inherited the family business of oppressing people. The apple doesn't fall far from the communist tree.

Let's be honest about why this is happening now. You've got Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American who grew up hearing firsthand what the Castro regime did to families like his. You've got an America First president who already removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela back in January — literally flew the guy to New York to face drug charges. And you've got an administration that has decided the 67-year era of pretending communist dictators 90 miles from the Florida Keys are just quirky neighbors is officially over.

The old playbook was simple: ignore the murders, normalize relations, pretend engagement would magically turn a totalitarian regime into a democracy. It didn't work with Cuba. It didn't work with China. It never works. But it made a lot of diplomats feel sophisticated at cocktail parties, and that's what really mattered.

Raúl Castro is 94 years old. He probably figured he'd run out the clock — that time would do what American politicians were too cowardly to do, which is make the whole thing go away. He was almost right.

Almost.

You kill Americans, you answer for it. I don't care if you're 94 or 194. That should have been the policy in 1996. It's the policy now. And every tin-pot dictator on the planet should be taking notes.