The route, which will begin operating on December 2, 2025 with an Airbus A330-200 leased from the Spanish company Plus Ultra, is part of the regime’s attempts to reactivate European tourism.
MADRID, Spain.– The state airline Cubana de Aviación will resume the direct connection between Havana and Frankfurt as of December 2, 2025, after more than twenty years without operating flights to Germany, reported this week the German Embassy in Cuba.
“The new direct Havana-Frankfurt flight of the Cubana de Aviación airline will effectively begin on December 2, 2025. With this, Cuba and Germany will be connected again,” the diplomatic headquarters published on its official Facebook page.
According to previous information from the German Office for the Promotion of Trade and Investment in Cuba (AHK), the route will be operated by an Airbus A330-200 leased to the Spanish company Plus Ultra, with capacity for 287 passengers — 17 in business class and 270 in economy. Two weekly flights are also planned to the city of Holguín, on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
The Cuban Minister of Transportation, Eduardo Rodríguez Dávila, had announced the new air connection in April, describing it as “a significant step in strengthening connectivity between Cuba and Europe, the result of Cubana de Aviación’s collaboration with other international airlines.”
Although Cubana de Aviación had not flown to Germany for more than two decades, the German company Condor It had already operated routes between both countries since 1990, when it inaugurated its first connection Frankfurt–Camagüey–Havana, and subsequently expanded its operations to Holguín, with regular flights for more than ten years.
The reestablishment of the route coincides with the Cuban regime’s attempts to boost international tourism – one of its main sources of income in foreign currency, along with the export of professional services and remittances – a sector that continues without recovering from the crisis caused by the pandemic and aggravated by the blackouts, the shortage of food and medicine and the inflation that affect the island.
Between January and September 2025Cuba received only 1,366,720 international visitors, 20.5% less than in the same period in 2024, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI). This is equivalent to 352,289 fewer visitors.
In total, the country registered 1,960,713 travelers during the first nine months of the year, 14.8% less than in 2024. The ONEI distinguishes between “travelers”, a category that includes Cuban residents abroad, and “international visitors”, a key indicator of tourism performance.
Although the Cuban government hopes that the new route will contribute to reactivating the arrival of European tourists, Cuban citizens who wish to travel to Germany must apply for a visa at the embassy.
Added to this situation is the lack of confidence in the efforts of Cubana de Aviación, which faces a deep operational crisis and is considered very insecure. At the beginning of 2025, the airline had only two active aircraft on the Island and thus launched a call for a training course for commercial pilots with a medium technical level.
In January, Joel Archer Santos, president of the Cuban Aviation Corporation (CACSA), acknowledged that the company was working on the recovery of several aircraft, although without specifying figures, and attributed the sector’s limitations to the US embargo, as is usual in the regime’s discourse.
