By Rick Fountain. BBC News
Online. Sunday, 24 September, 2000, 16:22 GMT 17:22 UK
Some of the detail behind the "Cuban hijack drama" which briefly
dominated the news last week has now emerged.
It turns out that the plane was not hijacked, that the pilot was a long-time
member of the Cuban Communist Party and that although the passengers ended up in
the United States, the plane was heading in a completely different direction,
towards Mexico.
There is still no full explanation for this strange and desperate exploit,
which killed one of the passengers.
The pilot, Angel Lenin Iglesias Hernandez, who's 35, says he left because of
what he called "problems" with one of his uncles, Joel Iglesias Leyva,
a former commander in Fidel Castro's revolutionary army.
Like his uncle, Mr Hernandez had been a Party member for a long time but he
hasn't said why he chose to flee, nor did he reveal the nature of the problem
with his uncle.
Even more mysteriously, he did not say why he set out with far too little
fuel, nor why the plane veered more than 90 degrees away to the west.
Hernandez knew the plane very well - he flew it daily over the fields of
western Cuba. It was a single-engined Antonov amphibious biplane, so slow that
it is used for crop-dusting.
SOS call
The world first learned of the incident when Cuba radioed, on Tuesday
morning, that a hijacked plane was heading towards them with passengers and not
nearly enough fuel.
Hernandez had on board his wife, their two sons and six others. Under grey
skies the little plane headed out over a heaving sea, apparently in the
direction of Miami, but then swung inexplicably away towards Mexico.
As the fuel gauge dipped to zero, over the Yucatan Channel, with no land to
be seen, the plane's occupants saw a cargo ship.
Mr Hernandez says he circled until the crew had seen them, then put down in
the water. The violent impact, and the pitching of the plane in six-foot waves,
killed one passenger, a cousin of Hernandez.
As the plane took water and started to sink, they were plucked to safety by
the freighter's crew, and later taken off by US coast guard personnel.
They were, in fact, closer to Cuba and to Mexico, than to the United States,
a point not lost on the Cubans.
Elian revisited
At the United Nations in New York later, the Speaker of the Cuban National
Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, said that by giving them asylum, the United States
had become "an accomplice in air piracy".
The nearest hospitals for the rescued passengers would have been in Mexico
or Cuba, he said. By taking them to Florida instead, the Americans had violated
accords on the smuggling of illegal migrants.
The State Department says meetings are currently going ahead in Washington
between US and Cuban officials about migration from Cuba.
But the spokesman, Richard Boucher said: "The plane that went down was
not a subject of discussion. It's not something we were going to raise."
And asked why the plane's passengers were flown to Miami rather than to the
nearest hospital on land, Mr Boucher replied that it had been a decision by the
coast guard based on medical necessity. | 