Cuba Reacts To Defection Attempt
In the first official public reaction from the Cuban authorities to Tuesday's incident, Cuba said Wednesday a Cuban crop-dusting pilot was missing with his aircraft after he picked up a group of people at a western landing strip.
His passengers, whose exact number and identities were not known, had boarded the plane "clearly in agreement with him," the government said in a statement.
There was nothing about Tuesday's incident on Cuban state television or radio -- the only authorized broadcasts available to the general public. There were no official statements from the Foreign Ministry, no bulletins from the Institute of Civil Aeronautics.
Instead, Cubans learned about black American congressmen who support the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo if they tuned into the 6 p.m. daily public affairs program, which had President Fidel Castro in the television studio audience.
On the 8 p.m. nightly news, they learned about what happened on the earlier program and watched footage of Juan Miguel Gonzalez returning to work after the seven-month battle to bring his 6-year-old boy Elian home from the United States in late June.
Cuba's media often remains silent for hours, even days at a time, waiting to formulate responses to international events affecting the island before making them public. In a developing incident such as Tuesday's apparent act of aviation piracy, Cuban authorities sometimes wait for things to play out first.
Wednesday's statement clearly indicated that the crop-dusting pilot, whose surname was Iglesias Hernandez, took off and headed north voluntarily after picking up the unscheduled passengers in western Pinar del Rio province. But the pilot later radioed that he was being hijacked to Florida, the statement added.
"The Cuban authorities do not know the exact number of people who were traveling on the hijacked plane," the statement said, adding the identities of those rescued were also unknown.
On Tuesday, word of the attempted defection seeped out, via telephone calls from relatives in the United States, glimpses at foreign news reports on television sets in tourist areas, and the word-of-mouth grapevine known as "Radio Bemba," which roughly means "Big Mouth Radio."
"Did they pick them all up? Did they all die?" a waiter who gave his name only as Jose asked as he served cappuccinos from a restaurant in Old Havana. He was surprised, and relieved, to learn only one of the 10 perished in the daring attempt.
The incident came at a prickly time, just before scheduled migration talks on Thursday between Cuban and U.S. officials in New York.
Havana maintains that under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Washington practically invites Cubans to climb aboard rickety rafts and make the dangerous journey across the Florida Straits by promising them the right to stay if they reach American soil.
Washington, meanwhile, accuses Havana of provoking th risky journeys by preventing Cubans who have U.S. visas from legally leaving the island. Cuban officials deny the charge.