A Russian-made Cuban plane crashed this Monday near Miamiin Florida, with two people on board who were unharmed, a spokesman for the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office reported.
The accident occurred about 10 miles west of the Opa-Locka airfield in Everglades National Park.said that spokesman, Mike Silva.
The pilots experienced some mechanical failure; they tried to land on a dirt road and the plane flipped, according to that source.
The identity and nationality of the two injured people are still unknown. But the CBP spokesman confirmed that both are fine and that they arrived in a Russian Antonov AN-2 single-engine biplane.
Images recorded by local televisions show the crashed plane with the letters ENSA, the initials of the Cuban Company of Air Services.
This Monday is the second similar incident in less than a month. On October 21, Cuban pilot Rubén Martínez Machado defected and landed in the Everglades, a huge wetland reserve located in South Florida.
Martínez Machado was also traveling in an ENSA Antonov AN-2. Authorities arrested him shortly after he landed, and he has been detained ever since for entering the United States illegally.
Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in three decades, and its inhabitants suffer from severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, 224,000 Cubans they were intercepted after irregularly entering the United States, according to CBP.
A record figure and a strong increase compared to the 39,000 Cubans arrested in the same period of the previous year.
Cubans heading to the United States mostly fly to Nicaragua, one of the only countries that does not require a visa, to travel from there to the north. But others try to cross the Straits of Florida in precarious boats.
The current exodus exceeds that registered during the Mariel crisis in the 1980s and of the rafters in 1994.
In this context, the United States decided to resume full visa processing on January 4. for immigrants at its Havana consulate, suspended since 2017, when Washington accused Cuba of “sonic attacks” against US officials.
The announcement took place after a meeting held in the Cuban capital by senior officials from both countries.
