The scheme capitalized on the worst aspects of Cuban life. In a regime so repressive, ordinary citizens have learned how to act like secret agents-a skill on which the success of the exodus depended. Cancio settled on flight engineers Rolando Herrera and Jaime Estevez, believing they’d be discreet coconspirators. (The same instincts warned him not to trust copilot Rolando Vila.) With Cuba’s transportation system near collapse, Cancio had a pretext for the great escape. Normally reserved for foreigners, the Aero Caribbean shuttle between Havana, Varadero and Cayo Largo had recently become available to Cuban civilians whenever an otherwise empty plane left the capital to pick up tourists from abroad. On Dec. 28, Cancio learned that he would be making the run from Havana to Varadero the next day.
“There is rum for the party,” the coded phone message went out to several families. Among them was Raul Ginebra, a 52-year-old mechanic who signed onto the escapade last summer and whose 1951 Plymouth squired various people, supposedly bound for a day at the beach in Varadero, to the airport during the night. Anesthesiologist Orlando Luna, 42, also received the call. He and his family had to get rid of friends who showed up unexpectedly, then board two buses with notoriously haphazard schedules to reach Jose Marti International Airport. When the doors opened at 5 a.m., Luna, wearing beach thongs, bought four tickets to Varadero, numbers 39-42. Then he learned to his horror that the ticket taker had been ordered to cut off the passenger list at 38. Flight engineer Estevez, who had stepped in to take control of checking passengers’ carnets, government-issued ID cards, assured the ticket taker he would accept responsibility for other passengers. His intercession was aimed at preventing anyone from noticing that many of the passengers, such as journalist Jorge Proenza, his wife and mother-in-law, were related. That would have aroused suspicion. Bused to an outbuilding near the plane, the passengers settled in for a tense half-hour wait. “This was a beach trip, but everyone looked as if they were at a funeral,” Proenza recalls. Everyone except the state-security agent, assigned to Aero Caribbean planes, the flight attendant and the copilot and his wife and daughter, who thought they were Varadero-bound.
Once the passengers got on the plane, phase two of the plan kicked in. The largest men, along with Dr. Luna, took seats in the front of the cabin. In the cockpit were Cancio, one of his three sons, flight engineers Herrera and Estevez and the security agent. Less than 10 minutes after the plane took off at 8:10, Herrera grabbed the g-un from the agent’s belt, while Estevez pushed him out of the cockpit, where he was seized by the group at the front. Luna injected him with a sedative and applied what passengers described as a chemical with a strong odor, perhaps chloroform or ether. Meanwhile, at the rear of the plane, the copilot and flight attendant became suspicious after seeing a group fan the air around the agent’s face. Does he need oxygen? the skeptical stewardess asked a passenger. “There’s no problem,” Luna replied. “How is it that the passengers are giving orders?” the stewardess demanded. “You gave the orders here, now we do,” a passenger shot back.
Cancio’s last hurdle was to allay the suspicions of Cuban air-traffic controllers as he veered north toward Miami. The Varadero tower OK’d his request for a route change to avoid “complex meteorological conditions.” He stalled them for the next couple of minutes by giving them false bearings. “We knew we couldn’t keep that up,” Cancio says. “They aren’t stupid.” So he hit upon an ingenious ruse: “I told them I had political problems on board.” A passenger, he ad-libbed, was holding two children at gunpoint; then he asked the tower to speak to him in English to “fool” the skyjacker into thinking the plane was heading for the United States. Cancio wasn’t taking any chances, however, flying about 60 feet above the water to elude Cuban radar detection-so low that the Miami tower failed to pick up his transmission. “Everyone was very tense,” says Proenza. “The women were praying.” A nearby Colombian plane picked up his signal and relayed word between Cancio and Miami. Within minutes-amid cries of “We’re in Florida!” and “Down with Fidel!"-48 people emerged to test their dreams of life in America.
