The Miami-based anti-Castro exile organization Brothers to the Rescue was originally founded to search for and rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida Straits. Cuban officials argued that Havana had exhausted every diplomatic avenue to prevent escalation, delivering more than a dozen formal complaints to U.S. authorities regarding repeated incursions into Cuban airspace. Raúl Castro was not yet president of Cuba at the time of the incident; he was Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and thus oversaw the operation. The declassified record demonstrates that U.S. officials understood the flights as dangerous provocations long before the incident occurred. The indictment has not produced waves of Cubans clamoring for American intervention, but public displays of support for Castro and Cuban sovereignty.