Cubana de Aviación 1958
Diario de la Marina notes (22 May 1958) that after a tour of 7 months in the USA, Jorge has returned to Cuba on a flight of Viscount de Cubana Aviación from Miami.
Cubana de Aviación operated the Vickers Viscount (a British four-engine turboprop airliner) in the late 1950s, becoming the first Latin American airline to fly them. Cubana integrated the Vickers Viscount into its fleet starting in 1956 to modernise service on regional and international routes (replacing older Douglas DC-4s).
A few months later...
*Cubana Flight 495 (1 November 1958): a tragic and historic event involved Viscount registration CU-T603 operating a scheduled flight from Miami International Airport to Varadero Airport, Cuba.
During the flight, anti-government rebels from the 26th of July Movement (acting on behalf of Fidel Castro) hijacked the aircraft to divert it to rebel-held territory near Preston Sugar Mills in Oriente Province. Due to the extended distance, darkness, and lack of runway lighting at the unlit target airfield, the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed into Nipe Bay, killing 14 of the 20 people on board. This is documented as one of the earliest fatal commercial aircraft hijackings.
The US Government itself stated that the event was outside its jurisdiction
Castroism was violent in the insurrection and much more so as a government. In its time they placed explosives in public places to force the population to stay in their homes, murdered police and military to provoke ferocious government repression, which must also be remembered, and which had as its climax the Castro strategy of “the three Zs [C in Spanish]: zero cinema, zero cabaret and zero c… in reference to brothels.”
This threat was quickly confirmed by the explosion of a bomb placed in a woman’s abandoned purse in a cabaret in Havana, wounding several young women, one of whom had to have her arm amputated, according to writer Jose Antonio Albertini in a conversation. He was also one of those who attempted to rescue Flight 495 from oblivion in his WLRN TV program.
Violence sometimes ravaged the insurgent ranks themselves, as when two young students in the city of Santa Clara were carrying a bomb that fatally exploded prematurely.
The bombs and kidnappings carried out by the rebel forces in compliance with the disastrous orders of the Castro brothers pale before the horrendous crime that occurred on November 1, 1958, exactly two months before a darkness that has extended for 66 years and 10 months arrived in Cuba. It happened two days before the last pluralist, albeit fraudulent, elections in our history.
As a sign that the spiral of violence was ready to operate outside Cuba, Raül Castro issued Order 30 authorizing the kidnapping of US citizens, which led in June 1958 to 49 Americans, including 20 civilians, employees of the US-owned Moa nickel mining plant and 29 Marines being kidnapped in the Sierra.
Incomprehensibly, the painful events of Flight 495 were hardly mentioned among the Cubans. The rescue involved Gerardo Reyes, a notable Colombian journalist who dedicated 10 years of his life to an investigation that culminated in a book entitled Flight 495, in which he sees innocent people involved in complex situations that can end with their own death.
Cubana de Aviación Flight 495 was the first aircraft hijacked in US airspace
The passengers had no connection with the Cuban government and were not a political objective; simply, the kidnappers apparently intended to transport weapons, ammunition and perhaps money to the eastern guerrillas.
The trip to Varadero, just over 300 kilometers, 45 minutes long, never reached its destination. On board the Vickers Viscount turboprop, there were 16 passengers, including a pregnant woman.
The aircraft was captured by five young militants of the hapless July 26 Movement. It is claimed that they were following orders from Raúl Castro, and the operation ended in tragedy, according to the newspaper Gente in its edition of November 16, 1958. Seventeen people died, including six American citizens.
None of the guilty paid for the crime: another Cuban tragedy that “nobody wants to hear about and least of all see.”
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