MIAMI, United States – “I had wanted to leave Cuba for a long time and was saving money to do it”, told Telemundo 51 the Cuban pilot Rubén Martínez Machado, who recently landed in Florida using an AN-2 plane of the Island regime.
However, the young man could not go ahead with his plan to leave the country. “After the government there [Cuba] approved a monetary change, my savings of 3,000 dollars were lowered to 1,500”, he explained.
At that point, he decided to use the agricultural fumigation plane in which he worked for the National Air Services Company and divert it to the United States. “The trouble was convincing myself to do it, because in the end, whatever it was, I was risking my life on it,” he pointed out.
In that sense, he said that the plane had been “no more than a means to escape from the Island.”
Martínez Machado told Telemundo 51 that three hours of crossing were enough for him, but not in a straight line. “First I went straight to what is international waters, then straight here, and then I went down the west coast to avoid the population,” he explained.
In this way, it came to the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, located off the Tamiami Trail, in the middle of the Everglades. The pilot crossed the Strait of Florida at low altitude to avoid radar, as a video shared by an American fisherman on social media showed.
According to his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, The first hearing was marked by the “aggressiveness” of the Prosecutor’s Office, which even asked for Martínez Machado’s mandatory detention, a fact that ultimately did not occur.
The lawyer explained to Radio Televisión Martí that one point in his client’s favor is that he was never interested in stealing the plane to deprive Cuba of the device, but instead saw it as a means of escaping from the island, for which he put at risk his life.
“In the end I made the decision to bet my life on being free, that is still at stake,” the 29-year-old pilot told Telemundo 51.
On October 21 itself, The Cuban Institute of Civil Aeronautics (IACC) described the theft of the plane as an act of “air piracy.”
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