Havana/Cubana de Aviación’s only long-haul four-engine, the Ilyushin Il-96-300 with registration CU-T1250, was ready to take off this Monday from Havana’s international airport to search in Venezuela for the bodies of the 32 national of the island killed in the US operation on Saturday that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The flight was scheduled to depart at two in the afternoon, as confirmed 14ymedio by a knowledgeable source who requests anonymity.
The plane “is full of soldiers and they are supposed to stay there,” adds the source. The process is carried out with enormous secrecy: it has not been attended to by regular airport employees, but by military personnel, and the registration does not appear on the flight geolocator pages.
Asked about the matter, an airport employee corroborates the information. “They put him on a secluded track, away from public view,” he says. The aircraft He has only been on the Island for three monthsafter “urgent maintenance” in Belarus.
“They put him on a secluded track, away from public view.”
After have systematically denied the presence of troops on Venezuelan soil, the Cuban regime decreed this Monday national mourning for the 32 deaths in the operation carried out by the United States. The Government, which had maintained silence after comments of Donald Trump – “many Cubans lost their lives protecting Maduro” – reported the events through the Presidency’s X account.
“As a result of the criminal attack perpetrated by the Government of the United States against the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 32 Cubans lost their lives in combative actions,” read the postwhich linked to a statement published in Granma.
The text indicated that the deceased “were carrying out missions on behalf of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, at the request of counterpart bodies of the South American country,” without explicitly saying that they were part of Maduro’s security circle. The presence of Cuban military personnel in Venezuela, confirmed by multiple sources in the last two decades, had been explicitly denied by the Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, in statements made in 2019 and reiterated in several subsequent interventions.
“They can come look for us and take us to prison, because we are not going anywhere”
Apart from that, there has been no further information about the steps that Havana intends to take in relation to the crisis in Venezuela, which, above all, puts at risk the main route of oil supply for Cuba. In the midst of this panorama, relatives of recruits undergoing mandatory military service say that they have taken away the young people’s cell phones and kept them incommunicado at the bases. “We are afraid that they are preparing to send them to Venezuela, some children!”, denounces a mother with 14ymedio.
Likewise, rumors of the imminent mobilization of reservists spread in the streets, although there is no confirmation of any kind. One of these reservists, residing in Holguín, states that he plans to refuse if they call him: “They can come look for us and take us to prison, because we are not going anywhere.”
What is clear, a sergeant tells this newspaper, is that the Armed Forces are in “position 1”, that is, “ready for combat.” In the streets of different cities, soldiers dressed in field clothes proliferate.
