On Christmas Eve, 2000, a British Airliner opened its landing gear near Heathrow airport after taking off from Havana and out dropped two corpses, frozen solid. They were shortly identified as 16 year-old Miguel Fonseca and 17 year-old Alberto Vázquez.
“Crazy blokes!” probably huffed some passengers, oblivious or uncaring that those Pounds they’d just spent on their Cuban vacation went straight into the coffers of the Stalinist police who drove the Cuban boys to such desperation. Also oblivious or uncaring that prior to the reign of that Stalinist regime people were almost as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape. Also oblivious that—despite what they hear, read and see from the worldwide media and Hollywood—tourism was actually a drop in pre-Castro Cuba’s economic bucket. Now—thanks to such as themselves–it’s the main lifeline, after Hugo Chavez.
On June 4th 1969, an Iberia Airliner, just landed in Madrid from Havana, was taxiing to the terminal when the frozen corpse of 16 year old Jorge Pérez dropped out. His partner in escape, Armando Socorras, 17, somehow survived in what Spanish medical authorities described as a form of “human hibernation.”
On July 21st 1991, the frozen corpses of Alexis Hernández 19, and José Acevedo 20, plopped onto Madrid airport’s tarmac from the landing gear of another Iberia Airlines flight.
On August 22, 1999, the frozen cadaver of Felix Julian Garcia dropped from a British airliner onto the tarmac of Gatwick airport, as it landed from Havana.
A month later, odor led officials of Italy’s Varese Airport to the decomposed corpse of Roberto García Quinta in the landing gear of an Alitalia Airlines flight that had landed from Santiago Cuba ten days earlier.
In July 2002, the frozen and battered corpse of a of 20 year old Cuban identified only as Wildredo D. was found in the landing gear of a Lufthansa Airliner at Dusseldrof airport.
In December 2002 a 20 year old Cuban who worked at Havana airport snuck into a pressurized compartment of Canadian Airliner, just under the cabin. He scurried out alive in Montreal airport 4 hours later.
Pre-Castro Cuba took in more immigrants per-capita (primarily from Europe) than the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950’s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans lived in Cuba. In 1958 the Cuban Embassy in Rome had a backlog of 12,000 applications for immigrant visas from Italians clamoring to immigrate to Cuba. This flood of (fellow First World) “wetbacks” was so alarming that in 1933, as a stopgap against these foreign rascals horning in on the “Cuban dream”, the Cuban government passed laws more draconian than Arizona and Georgia’s today: a majority of employees at all Cuban businesses had to be Cuban natives.
Would our construction, service and hospitality industries survive (enforcement) of such a law nowadays?
Such was Cuban prosperity till 1959. Then came the Castro brothers and Che Guevara.
Our friends at Breitbart help inform with some items perhaps partly unknown even WITHIN Miami-Dade?
Unreal.
There seems to be a slight discrepancy with my memory where I remember that one body landed in a field apx 5 miles short of London Gatwick airport and your article. Here is a cut and paste from Wikipedia – On 24 December 2000, 16-year-old Maikel Almira and 15-year-old Alberto Rodriguez climbed into the wheel wells of a British Airways Boeing 777 in Havana, Cuba. Almira’s body was found in a field five miles from Gatwick airport in England. Rodriguez’s body fell from the aircraft the following day as it departed for a flight to Cancún, Mexico. Almira had left a note for his mother indicating he was going to the United States, however tragically the departure of a Miami bound flight had been delayed and the flight to Gatwick took over its take off slot
The 50% employment law in 1933 for all businesses in Cuba was aimed at Spanish enterprises. Spaniards kept control of the Cuban economy after their defeat in 1898. They would discriminate against Cubans on the island by hiring only other Spaniards, especially nephews who migrated from Spain with nothing more valuable than a pair of cheap alpargata canvas shoes. These youths would be exploited by working all day in a bodega and usually slept in the back room on top of rice sacks. Spaniards controlled the cigar making industry in Cuba and the 50% employment law ended that monopoly. The law should have gone into effect in 1902.