Magela, a 28-year-old from Havana, had to fly to Santiago de Chile on July 7 via Buenos Aires, a long-awaited reunification trip and with a pandemic in between. But her flight to Argentina was on a ship from the Venezuelan company Estelar rented by Cubana de Aviación, routes that are now on hold and that left more than 200 Argentines stranded in Cuba last week.
For now, there are no Cubana flights between Havana and Buenos Aires and there are no expectations of resuming them, an employee of the state airline confirmed to this newspaper.
“It took me a lot of work to get that ticket, my family paid more than 1,200 dollars and now there is no flight and no response,” laments Magela, a Cuban with a Chilean nationalized mother who has been trying to take her daughter to Valparaíso for years.
Since the process began, Magela’s family has had to overcome enormous obstacles. The covid crisis and the suspension of consular services, the high cost of tickets from the island, the requirement of a transit visa and, now, the retention of a ship, with a Venezuelan-Iranian crew, in Argentina since the past June 8, which has generated a conflict between Caracas and Buenos Aires.
“They have refunded my money but the dollars are only part of it, I had everything planned to fly in the first week of July and now I don’t know how I’m going to be able to leave on those dates”
The South American country does not accept flights of the aircraft, which operated with the code CU-361 and in which tourists who had accumulated after the cancellation of at least four departures from Havana had to return, but the damage also reaches the Cubans who planned to leave on one of those journeys.
“They have refunded my money but the dollars are only part of it, I had everything planned to fly in the first week of July and now I don’t know how I’m going to be able to leave on those dates,” laments Magela, for which he is now a headache to be able to find a flight.
Panama, the Dominican Republic and Argentina are the variables that Magela manages, but the quotas are limited due to the high demand created by the unprecedented exodus that the Island is experiencing. more than 140,000 Cubans who in the last eight months have arrived in the United States, almost all by land after taking a flight to Nicaragua, the airlines are overwhelmed by requests for tickets.
“We can’t do anything else. We recommend that you investigate other companies,” responded bluntly but without many details a female voice that – after dozens of attempts to communicate – alerted customers who called to ask questions on Monday by phone.
“It seems little when compared to the Argentine tourists who have stayed here and cannot leave, so hardly anyone talks about the Cubans. But this is my life that I have had on pause for at least two years since the start of the pandemic. My mother has spent thousands of dollars and I’m still here,” complains Magela.
Others have chosen to redirect the route to their destination. “They told me I can transit through the Dominican Republic, so that’s what I’m going to do,” says Néstor, another Cuban who flies to Chile with a visa that will allow him to marry his girlfriend who lives in that city.
“This was such a good option that we already knew it wasn’t going to last long.” While other transit countries, such as Panama and Colombia, tighten their regulations for the arrival of Cubans, the state airline, with planes from Estelar, offered a journey without major complications for residents of the island. But what seemed safe and easy became has complicated.
An added problem, which is added to the blockade of Estelar’s ships in Argentina, is the impossibility that Cubans have to acquire tickets on the sales pages, due to the lack of Visa or Mastercard.
“In addition to new reports from the FBI, justice is also seeking to reconstruct their itineraries prior to arrival in our country, to determine the true reason for their trip”
The controversy began two weeks ago when another plane, coming from the Mexican city of Querétaro, after a stopover in Venezuela and bound for the Ezeiza international airport, took off to go to Uruguay to refuel and had to return because Montevideo denied it the landing.
Uruguay’s decision led the Argentine authorities to review the cargo: the aircraft was bringing auto parts from Mexico, but what was alarming was the crew, which was unusually large for a cargo plane: 14 Venezuelans and five Iranians.
Owned by the Iranian company Mahan Air until last January, the plane belongs to Emtrasur, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan Consortium of Aeronautical Industries and Air Services (Conviasa), firms sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury.
Now, the Argentine Justice is investigating possible links between the crew and international terrorism, since one of its members, Gholamreza Gashemi, has the same name as a member of the Quds Force, accused of being behind the attack on an Israeli center in Buenos Aires. Aires, in 1994, with a balance of 85 dead and 300 wounded.
This Monday the Argentine newspaper Clarion published that the Iranian pilot under investigation had carried out in the last year and a half “at least 13 trips from Iran to Venezuelamany of them before the alleged commercial agreement of Mahan Air with the air firm of the Government of Nicolás Maduro”.
For those trips, the note continues, “he manned cargo planes under the flag of Conviasa, the Venezuelan state company that would have incorporated the Mahan Air Boeing 747 into its fleet, which remains seized by order of Judge Federico Villena. In addition to new FBI reports , justice also seeks to reconstruct their itineraries prior to arrival in our country, to determine the true reason for their trip.
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