MIAMI — The mass exodus from Cuba took an unusual twist Friday, when someone in a old Soviet-era cropduster took off from the island just 90 miles north of Key West and landed somewhere west of Krome Avenue in the Everglades.
“Somebody from Cuba took a plane and just landed it in the Everglades,” said U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Rachel Torres. “It’s one guy and he appears to be OK.”
Miami-Dade Police said the aircraft landed about 30 miles west of Krome at the Dade Collier Training and Transitional Airport, a strip that was the the site of a planned massive Everglades Jetport that was derailed over environmental concerns in 1970. Officers were heading to the scene.
Spain-based news outlet Cibercuba identified the Cuban pilot who took the plane as Rubén Martínez. According to the report, Martínez supposedly redirected an old Soviet plane AN-2 from Santi Spiritus to South Florida on Friday morning. Martínez is a pilot with a small Cuban state domestic chartered flight.
Many Cubans, desperate to leave the island and start over in the United States are making the perilous journey in greater numbers across the Florida Straits. Already dealing with the largest escalation of Cuban migration in nearly a decade, U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard crews patrolling South Florida and the Keys report that the number of people leaving Cuba for a trip across the Straits so far in October is higher than average.
Since the beginning of October, the Border Patrol says it’s taken into custody almost 500 people from Cuba who have arrived in the Florida Keys, mostly aboard homemade, unseaworthy boats. The U.S. Coast Guard said it has intercepted 748 Cuban migrants along the Florida Straits. That’s almost as many people as the Coast Guard stopped at sea between Cuba and South Florida during an entire 12-month period from October 2020 through September 2021 — 838.
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