The Department of Justice just unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-old former Cuban president Raul Castro and five co-conspirators with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder, and destruction of aircraft over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Thirty years, folks. It took thirty years and a president who doesn't do the wave at baseball games with murderous dictators to finally make it happen.

But sure, tell me again how Obama's handshake diplomacy was the "smart" approach to Cuba.

For those who need a refresher — or were busy being gaslit by the legacy media into thinking Cuba was a charming vacation destination — here's what happened. In February 1996, Cuban military jets shot down two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a humanitarian group that searched for rafters fleeing Castro's communist paradise. Four American citizens were murdered over international waters. Not Cuban airspace. International waters. And according to the indictment, audio evidence captures Raul Castro himself ordering the attack on those civilian planes.

Let that sink in. We have audio tape of a communist dictator ordering the murder of American civilians, and it took until Donald Trump's second term for anyone in Washington to do something about it.

Now contrast that with the Obama years. Barack Obama didn't just ignore the murders of four Americans — he rolled out the red carpet for their killer. Remember the iconic photo of Obama doing the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana in 2016? Twenty years after the shootdown, and our president was yukking it up with the guy who ordered it. No indictment. No accountability. Just normalized relations and a lot of back-patting from the foreign policy "experts" who told us engagement would change Cuba.

Spoiler alert: it didn't change Cuba. Cuba is still a communist hellhole.

The Trump administration, as reported by Hot Air and Not the Bee, is using this indictment as leverage against Havana — because that's what actual diplomacy looks like. You don't reward dictators with baseball outings. You charge them with murder.

And the timing here is just chef's kiss. While the DOJ is finally holding a Castro accountable for killing Americans, Senator Bernie Sanders — the man who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and has never met a communist regime he couldn't find something nice to say about — is out there publicly defending Cuba. Again. Because of course he is. Bernie has been carrying water for every failed Marxist experiment on the planet for half a century, and apparently he's not about to stop now just because we have audio tape of the Cuban government ordering hits on civilians.

Raul Castro is 94 years old. He's lived a long, comfortable life despite being responsible for the deaths of four Americans — Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. Their families have waited three decades for this moment. Three decades of watching American presidents shake hands with the man who killed their loved ones.

President Trump just ended that wait. No diplomatic niceties. No "strategic patience." Just an indictment, four murder charges, and a message to every tin-pot dictator on the planet: kill Americans, and eventually a real president will come along and make you answer for it.

Better late than never. But man, it shouldn't have taken this long.