Brothers to the Rescue was founded in May 1991 after several pilots were touched by the death of a fifteen-year-old adolescent named Gregorio Pérez Ricardo, who fleeing Castro’s Cuba on a raft, perished of severe dehydration.  The organization, a small, non-profit corporation, conducts its humanitarian missions searching for rafters in the Florida Straits, through the efforts of a group of pilots, observers and volunteers from numerous countries, including Argentina, Cuba, Perú, France, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, the United States, Venezuela and former Cuban rafters.

Brothers to the Rescue has conducted over 2,400 aerial search missions.  These operations have resulted in the rescue of more than 4,200 men, women and children ranging from a five-day old infant to a man 79 years of age, and the rescue of thousands of others during the refugee crisis of 1994.

On February 24th 1996, Armando Alejandre Jr, Carlos Costa and Mario de la Pena – all American citizens – and Pablo Morales, a Cuban-born American resident, carried out a mission over international waters near Havana when their planes were shot down by a Cuban MiG-29 upon orders from the Cuban government.  All four pilots died on the spot.

It has been estimated that Brothers to the Rescue pilots have saved one life for every two hours of flight time.  This is considered a record rate among professional search and rescue organizations such as the Civil Air Patrol and the United States Air Force.  Additionally, there have been flights to drop food and water supplies to stranded rafters in deserted Bahamian Islands, as well as weekly deliveries of emergency food, medicine and clothing to a Cuban refugee detention camp in Nassau, Bahamas.  The organization has also conducted search missions for survivors of shipwrecks of U.S. citizens, Bahamians, Haitians and missing divers.

Brothers to the Rescue plans to maintain an active program that addresses the most basic human needs of those struggling for freedom.

President John F. Kennedy suspended a second airstrike as he has grown weary of the plan and was quickly convinced that, in his own words, “it was far too large to be clandestine and yet too small to be successful.” Nevertheless, on April 17 the exile’s Brigade 2506 set out towards Cuba’s southern beach known as Bahia de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs. The plans were ill-conceived and poorly executed. The exiles were quickly fired upon by both ground and air troops. Castro ordered approximately 20,000 troops towards the beach, while the Cuban air force dominated the skies. By April 19 the invasion came to an end. The aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion was grim.

Though some exiles escaped to the sea, many were killed and more than 1,000 were imprisoned by the Cuban regime. The prisoners of Bay of Pigs remained in squalid conditions behind bars for 20 months until US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy struck a deal with the Cuban dictatorship, assuring a trade of $53 million worth of baby food and medicine in exchange for the prisoners. On December 23rd 1962, the first freed prisoners of the Brigade returned to the US. The rest would follow thereafter. Most stayed living in Florida, particularly in Miami, where they remained active in anti-Castro politics.

The missiles appeared in Cuba as a direct result of Castro’s alignment and dependency on the Soviet Union. The Soviets intended to change the balance of power in the world and to obtain concessions in Europe from the United States. Since Castro announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist in the early 1960’s, the Soviets began flexing their political muscles in Cuba, considering just how close the island was to the United States.

The USSR exercised a tight control over the Cuban economy, accounting for more than half of the island’s total trade and financing over 40% of Cuba’s imports.

In the end, a nuclear disaster was averted when the US reached an agreement with Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev when the latter offered to remove the missiles in Cuba in exchange for the US assurance that they would not invade the island.

The Elian case also mobilized and energized the Cuban-American community in Miami like no other event has been able to do. For the past four decades the Cuban-American community struggled to “make it” in America, peaceful, respectful of the law. The community turned its energies toward informing the American public about Cuba’s reality, preventing a normalization of U.S. relations with Castro and reversing the unfair demonizing of Cuban-Americans that had taken place in the America media.

The Cuban community also became disillusioned with an alienated from American society and particularly from the Democratic Party. Since the Bay of Pigs events in 1961, Cubans have felt that the Democrats “betrayed” the Cubans’ aspirations to free their homeland. The sending of Elian back to Cuba was seen as another betrayal and rekindled feelings that have been dormant for many years.

In the final analysis the Elian case developed into a wake-up call for the American public not to provide a gift of trade, investment and tourism to an aging anti-American dictator that certainly had done nothing to deserve it.