Luis Raul Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez, a former Cuban military pilot who has been charged with complicity in the downing of two humanitarian mission planes, was sentenced to seven months in prison for immigration violations in the U.S.
Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez admitted he concealed his military service in past immigration applications to U.S. agencies.
His lawyer said he feared being denied if he had been honest.
Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez, 64, has already served more than six months in pretrial detention.
But his time behind bars is likely to extend beyond his sentence on the immigration case, given the new charges that accuse him, four other pilots and former Cuban leader Raul Castro of a conspiracy to kill Americans in the 1996 attack on the humanitarian planes.
Those planes were flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that flew Cessnas over the water to Cuba, helping guide refugees and dropping pro-democracy leaflets.
Cuban air force MiGs hunted three of them during the Feb. 24, 1996, flight, shooting down two of the unarmed Cessnas and killing four Americans. They were brought down in international waters, according to an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization.
A third plane escaped.
Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez is accused in the federal indictment of being on the ground in his MiG as a fellow pilot took down the two Cessnas, then he and another MiG were launched to help hunt the final plane.
The indictment against the pilots and Mr. Castro details radio traffic relaying the shoot-down orders.
That has sparked speculation that Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez is cooperating with U.S. authorities in the new case.
Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez came to the U.S. in 2024 as part of a Biden-era parole program. Experts said the fact that he was admitted, despite his past military history with an adversarial nation, represents a major breakdown in the vetting that then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had promised.
U.S. prosecutors didn’t file a public sentencing memo in the case, but Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez’s lawyer did, asking for a sentence of time served.
The attorney said Gonzalez-Pardo Rodriguez did disclose his military service in a 2016 visa application but didn’t report it later.
“Instead, the later omissions appear to have been motivated by fear, confusion, and perhaps a concern that truthful answers would jeopardize his ability to remain in the United States with his family after finally escaping the conditions in Cuba,” the lawyer, Miguel Rosada, said in the court filing. “While those decisions were unquestionably wrong and the Defendant accepts responsibility for them, they do not reflect the conduct of someone motivated by malice.”
