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Change Your Life! |
What Plane? Cuban plane incident ignored by state media |
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News
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September 21, 2000
HAVANA (AP) - As the world awaited news on the nine survivors aboard a small plane that was pirated out of Cuba, the communist island's government for hours mentioned nary a word about the audacious act. It was as if it never occurred. All day Tuesday, there was nothing about that morning's incident on state television or radio - the only authorized broadcasts available to the general public. There were no official statements from the Foreign Ministry, no bulletins from the Institute of Civil Aeronautics. Instead, Cubans learned about black American congressmen who support the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo if they tuned into the 6 p.m. daily public affairs program, which had President Fidel Castro in the television studio audience. On the 8 p.m. nightly news, they learned about what happened on the earlier program and watched footage of Juan Miguel Gonzalez returning to work after the seven-month battle to bring his 6-year-old boy Elian home from the United States in late June. Cuba's media often remains silent for hours, even days at a time, waiting to formulate responses to international events affecting the island before making them public. In a developing incident such as Tuesday's apparent act of aviation piracy, Cuban authorities sometimes wait for things to play out first. As of late Tuesday, it was still unclear if the act was a hijacking in which people were taken from Cuba against their will, or if it was a collaborative theft of a plane by a group of people who all wanted to go to the United States. The exact nature of the act remained unclear in the wee hours of Wednesday, when the government issued an official statement that was published in the Communist Party daily Granma. The note largely was a compilation of facts in the case, taken from foreign media, and expressed no official opinion. "At the close of this edition of Granma, Cuban authorities do not know the exact number of people on the hijacked plan, nor the identity of the 10 rescued by the merchant ship, as it has not received any additional information," the statement said. It was dated at 1 a.m. Wednesday. Despite the early lack of official information on the island, word still seeped out, via telephone calls from relatives in the United States, glimpses at foreign news reports on television sets in tourist areas, and the word-of-mouth grapevine known as "Radio Bemba," which roughly means "Big Mouth Radio." "Did they pick them all up? Did they all die?" a waiter who gave his name only as Jose asked as he served cappuccinos from a restaurant in Old Havana. He was surprised, and relieved, to learn only one of the 10 perished in the daring attempt. The incident came at a prickly time, just before scheduled migration talks on Thursday between Cuban and U.S. officials in New York. Havana maintains that under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Washington practically invites Cubans to climb aboard rickety rafts and make the dangerous journey across the Florida Straits by promising them the right to stay if they reach American soil. Washington, meanwhile, accuses Havana of provoking the risky journeys by preventing Cubans who have U.S. visas from legally leaving the island. Cuban officials deny the charge.
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