“I left Cuba flying in an old glider where the spots and seams were coming loose.”

Ismael Hernández Chirino felt enormous relief when he finally saw land: he had been praying to the heavens for some time that the cloth wing of the glider that kept him high above the Strait of Florida would not tear.

It had been nearly two hours since Ismael and his friend* had escaped their native Cuba, and this was the first time they had seen anything other than water, sky, and four-meter waves crashing beneath their feet.

“We saw land after an hour and fifty minutes of flying,” Ismael told BBC Mundo, “we followed the beach line until I could see the international airport.”

Beneath their feet finally stretched the United States and the dream of a future where the scarcity they endured on the island for so long would barely be a memory.

Ismael and his colleague are part of an exodus that has seen more than 425,000 Cubans arrive in the northern country between 2022 and 2023.This is evident from figures from the US Border Control Agency.

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Analysts assure that the current wave of Cuban migration is greater than that of the 1990s, during the so-called “truss crisis.”

But Ishmael had arrived not on a raft, but on a glider for short flights, and he still had the hardest part of his journey to go, he still had to land.

Although Ismael’s partner has been mentioned in other publications, at BBC Mundo we are omitting his name at Ismael’s request.

love of flight

Despite his youth, Ismael had a large number of jobs before leaving Cuba: he worked as a carpenter in his parents’ house in Havana, he was a cardboard cutter and a welder.

But of all, he most enjoyed the job he got immediately after graduating, with the maritime mission of the Cuban Border Guard Forces.

“I graduated high school and almost learned to fly these planes.“, says Ismael, referring to the motorized hang glider that brought him to the US. “We were in charge of surveillance and checking that there were no drug shipments, just surveillance work.”

It was a pilot program that the Cuban government attempted to implement using these small aircraft to support coastal surveillance efforts.

Ismael explains that the job was a dream come true: “I really have to say that I have known that I wanted to fly since I was little.”.

“For life. Since the first time I saw an airplane. Because he was a louse who could lift a meter off the ground. “I knew I wanted to fly.”

However, the work with the guard did not last long.

Due to budget cuts, hang gliders were replaced by other, cheaper surveillance methods and Ismael ended up in the tourism industry, as a taxi driver for local and foreign travelers arriving in Havana.

Chance

Ismael says that while working as a taxi driver, he met a friend who was involved in a new program that the Aviation Club – affiliated with the Cuban Ministry of Transport – wanted to implement to promote tourism: use motorized hang gliders to the delight of tourists.

“He calls me and says, ‘Look, you’re not on the list. [del programa] but there everyone is afraid of this device. If you want to come and show your face…’. And then I walked away.”

Having previously flown the ships, Ismael almost immediately became part of the pilot team and began accruing flying hours, an experience that would, unknowingly, become indispensable on his next voyage.

The idea to leave Cuba, Ismael says, arose almost “overnight,” when the island’s economic crisis also began to threaten the Aviation Club program.. For example, the supervision of the ships was carried out by fewer and fewer people, including Ismael.

“For the past two weeks it was just my boyfriend and I [cuidando el planeador]. It was as if the rabbit was guarding the carrot.”.

“One day I was arranging the plane when my friend came and said, ‘Well, what should we do?’ That same day we prepared everything, we received fuel, we were able to make adjustments to the plane to arrive and we left the next morning.”.

Fly fly

Without even notifying their relatives, Ismael and his partner set out from a rental house near Havana, guided only by a cell phone’s GPS.

Ismael tried to stay focused and kept checking that all the parts of the worn-out plane were working properly, but his mind kept wandering.

“I became very nervous, very tense at that moment when I realized that all I saw was sea and sea and sea, and that there was not a single piece of sand for me to fall on. And it becomes even more complicated when you look down and see waves of two or three meters.”

On March 25, 2023, after a grueling 1 hour and 50 minute flight, Key West, the southernmost point of the continental US, appeared on the horizon. But the most dangerous part of the journey was yet to come, land the glider at Key West International Airport without communicating with air authorities.

“I took the final approach and, well, I gave up on it because it was quite complicated,” says the young man, still surprised that he had achieved a feat that everywhere seemed impossible.

“I slipped between two planes, one on its way and another about to take the runway.. Luckily they saw me.”

Chaos took over the runway as airport officers and various authorities arrived to see what had happened.

“When I arrived in Key West, the firefighters arrived because the plane’s suspension was broken and it was stuck in the middle of the runway. And when the border agents arrived, they said to me, ‘Don’t tell me, they’re Cubans.’.

Ismael and his colleague were placed under the custody of US immigration authorities and ordered to pass 6 months in an immigration detention center.

On April 4 The Aviation Club published a statement classifying the action as a “clear violation of Cuban airspace.”a ‘theft’, and asked for the plane to be returned.

BBC Mundo attempted to obtain statements from Cuban authorities regarding the case but had not received a response as of the time of publishing this article.

The Cuban Drama

Cuba is facing an economic and energy crisis that some experts compare to the so-called “special period” the island experienced in the 1990s, with the fall of the Soviet Union.

For Ishmael it is clear that this was the same reason that led him to embark on such a journey: “We were going to lose our jobs, we already had a complicated situation because we had invested all our savings to fly these planes with tourists, but everything indicated that we would have to close.”

“Being on the streets, going hungry and our family going hungry, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”.

Today, from the other side of the strait that took him so much effort to cross, Ismael sees things with different eyes: “I have the best impression of the United States, the first few days I hardly slept when I had so much saw things I never thought would happen.” see”.

He currently lives in Tampa with his girlfriend and is waiting for some paperwork to be resolved so he can go to work.

What is certain is that he continues to look with his eyes in the sky for the opportunity to work in the aviation sector, trying to recreate the feeling he had when he finally managed to see Florida on the horizon.

“It was almost like I felt like the king of the world, like everything was too small for me. Flying has that, it frees you from everything… It gives you a different perspective, it gives you the feeling that there is no problem that has no solution.” (JO)