A few days ago, Cuban Dennys Bello turned on his cell phone and began a live broadcast on Facebook from Terminal Three of Havana International Airport. “We want them to respect the tickets that have already been sold, because we were not notified,” one of the women who make up the group of Cubans who feel “cheated” can be heard saying. Their complaints are directed at the low-cost airline Wingo, belonging to the Copa Holdings group, one of the most powerful on the continent and owned by Panamanian businessman Stanley Motta, who appeared in the pages of Forbes as one of the richest men in the world. The Cubans paid the airline tickets of almost $2,000 to board a flight with a stopover in Colombia and then continue their trip to Nicaragua, from where they planned to undertake the journey through Central America that more than half a million Cubans have made in the last three years to reach the United States.
“We don’t want a refund,” the same woman says in the video. “Because we won’t receive even a third of what we paid. We demand to fly, we want to fly. There are people here who are practically homeless because we sold our houses, there are children, there are elderly people,” she says, while the group remains outside the airport, waiting for a response from the airline.
This Monday, dozens of Cubans gathered again outside the airport. Several people have shared videos on social media of a crowd of people shouting “we want to fly.” They are demanding that Wingo airline allow them to board the flight to Bogotá, one of the routes they have to get to San Salvador and then to Managua, since in 2021 the Nicaraguan government removed the visa requirement for Cuban citizens and that South American country became the escape route for 600,000 Cubans, the largest exodus in the history of the island.
In the midst of the revolt at the airport, Cuban authorities sent the police to break up the protests. Even though the Colombian consulate in Havana issued a statement On July 4, where it states that Cuban citizens “do not require a visa to make direct airport transit to a third State in Colombia’s international airports,” the airline insists on its official page that Cubans have as a requirement “a valid visitor visa, as well as a return ticket to the country on Wingo’s own network.”
According to the airline, these requirements “respond to compliance with what was expressed in the recent statement by the Colombian Foreign Ministry,” which establishes that “a foreign passenger can only be considered in transit if he or she has in the same transport contract both the arrival route to Colombian territory, as well as the departure route to a third country as a continuation of the trip.” They also clarified that they are not “requesting a transit visa,” but that the required requirement is the “visitor visa – entry to Colombia,” since the airline’s transport contract only allows direct flights between Cuba and Colombia.
Starting July 8, the airline will only transport Cuban passengers with a visa to enter Colombia “without any exception,” which would leave thousands of Cubans stranded who spent between $1,500 and $2,000 on tickets after selling all their belongings. Although Wingo offered to refund their money for the Havana-Bogotá route, those affected, who were not informed of these rules before purchasing their tickets, are reluctant to accept an amount that does not compensate for the money invested in planning this one-way trip.
A brake on emigration through airlines
Last March, the US State Department imposed visa restrictions on executives of charter flight companies “for facilitating irregular migration” to that country. According to the statement the noticethese measures “are taken in response to the growing trend of charter airlines offering flights to Nicaragua aimed primarily at irregular migrants,” Brian Nichols, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said in a statement. X that the new visa restriction policy “is one of several actions underway to protect migrants and to end this abusive practice.”
Since then, this is not the first time that an airline has left thousands of Cubans stranded after buying tickets to leave the country. Last month, Colombian airline Avianca also cancelled its flights from Havana to Bogota and on its official website recommended that customers request a refund for their tickets.
In the midst of the country’s greatest economic crisis, and with no hope that anything will change in the near future, Cubans are emigrating en masse. In recent times, the United States Government has emphasized the need to opt for illegal emigration to that country, and not other routes such as crossing the 90 miles on rafts through the Straits of Florida or the routes through Central America. Since January 2023, the Biden administration opened the Humanitarian Parole program to Cuban citizens, a legal route through which 100,500 Cubans have been authorized to travel to the United States until May, according to the Biden administration. data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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