Argentine communist who hijacked plane to Cuba in 1973 desperate to return home now

From our Bureau of Deep Regrets with some assistance from our Bureau of Latrine American Un-Magical Realism

Talk about regrets! A rabid communist who has spent half a century living in Castrogonia after hijacking a plane is now pleading to return to his native Argentina because he finds life intolerable in the Caribbean leftist utopia.

He abandoned his wife and children in Argentina only to live in misery in Castrogonia, where he expected to be hailed as a hero. Alone, crippled, depressed, and starving, the old man is now begging to be returned to his native land, where, ironically, a “right wing” president has just assumed office.

Talk about poetic injustice! Talk about un-magical realism! The person handling his return to Argentina is the son he abandoned back in 1973, for the sake of a life in a communist paradise.

Abridged from 14yMedio via Translating Cuba

With two strokes, a poorly trimmed beard and a nervous wreck, no one would say that the patient Basilio José Mazor, awaiting death in the municipality of Artemisa, is the same young Argentinean who, on 4 July 1973, hijacked a Boeing 737 and forced its landing in Havana. Now, after spending his entire life in the country whose regime he revered, the impossibility of a decent old age has motivated his son to demand Mazor’s return to his native country.

Mazor starred in the “most forgotten air hijacking in Argentina,” the digital Infobae recalled this Tuesday, along with some photographs that show the deplorable state of the former “air pirate.” A sympathizer, although not a member, of the People’s Revolutionary Army – the military arm of the Marxist-oriented Revolutionary Workers Party – he boarded the Aerolíneas Argentinas plane that took him to Cuba at the age of 24 with a shotgun under his poncho.

For his part, Mazor was jailed briefly and released shortly after, and was issued a ration book and some clothing. He worked as a children’s soccer coach and was married twice. He had daughters from both marriages, but they emigrated to Mexico and Miami, respectively. Taking advantage of his status as a foreigner, for a time he dedicated himself to buying items and food in the so-called diplotiendas to resell them later. That business, however, also came to an end.

Suffering from depression, with difficulty communicating and with several consequences from his strokes, Mazor regrets being trapped in the current crisis on the Island at the age of 74 and wants to leave. He never talks about what happened on July 4, 1973. His old friend Rody Piraccini, a journalist from Pergamino, summed up his life this Wednesday in a phrase that sounds like an epitaph: “He thought that in Cuba he would be a hero, but they put him to work in the sugarcane fields.”