The six armed men commandeered the Cubana Airlines jet mid-air March 19 and ordered the pilots to fly to Florida. The plane was running out of fuel, however, and had to land in Havana, where authorities allowed it to refuel before taking off for Key West. U.S. authorities arrested and charged the perpetrators after the aircraft landed on U.S. soil, but they refused to return the plane or extradite the hijackers, as the Cuban government had demanded. On April 10, U.S. courts released the six on bail.

The revision of the charges followed an investigative trip to Cuba by five defense attorneys for the hijackers, prosecutors, and FBI agents. It was arranged on the request of the defense, and prosecutors joined in. The trial of the six was scheduled to start in Key West September 8.

The DC-3 was carrying 31 people on board. According to AP, some of the hijackers’ relatives who were on the flight have been allowed by Washington to stay in the United States.

The incident was one of a string of seven hijackings of Cuban planes and vessels between August 2002 and April of this year.

“Why do these people leave?” Cuban president Fidel Castro asked in a televised address March 19, the day of the DC-3 hijacking. “Because they are absolutely certain of their impunity. Why do these people leave, in addition to the certainty of their impunity? Because they are welcomed there as heroes and used as raw material for anti-Cuban propaganda. They leave because there is a law, in effect for 37 years now, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, a murderous law—as we define it—that has cost thousands of lives and created countless problems.”

Approved by the U.S. Congress in 1966, the Cuban Adjustment Act encourages people to leave Cuba for the United States by providing virtually automatic asylum to any Cuban who lands on Florida’s shores, regardless of crimes they may have committed to get there, and offering them expedited permanent residency status. It is one among a host of hostile policies Washington has directed at the Cuban people for more than four decades, since the triumph in 1959 of the Cuban Revolution. These measures have included bombings, sabotage, scores of assassination attempts against Castro and other Cuban leaders, and an economic war that continues to this day.

Castro pointed out in his March 19 broadcast that the perpetrators of the first four hijackings up until that point walked free in the streets of Miami. The U.S. government holds that if a pilot not under coercion willingly flies a plane to the United States, then that act is not a hijacking and no criminal charges are brought.

On April 11, after a speedy trial, Cuban authorities convicted and executed three ringleaders of the hijacking of a passenger ferry in Havana nine days earlier. Since that time, no successful hijackings have taken place. In July, Cuban authorities foiled two attempts, including one on a boat belonging to the Cuban company GeoCuba, which made it to international waters in the Bahamas. After persistent demands by Havana, the U.S. Coast Guard returned the hijackers of the boat to the Caribbean nation along with the three guards of the vessel who had been overpowered by the attackers.

In August, a Cuban court sentenced six men convicted of hijacking the GeoCuba boat to jail terms of between 7 and 10 years.

Washington and other imperialist powers used the executions of the three ferry hijackers in April to launch an international propaganda campaign against Cuba. In this campaign they also used the earlier arrests by Cuban authorities of 75 opponents of the Cuban Revolution, who were convicted and jailed for taking money and collaborating with U.S. government representatives to aid Washington in carrying out its economic war on Cuba, The firm stance of the Cuban government in defending the country’s sovereignty, however, seems to be paying off in turning the tide of hijackings and similar provocative incidents in the recent period.  
 
 
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