Cuban Pilot Says He Ditched Plane

Lost, confused and running low on fuel, the pilot of the stolen crop duster deliberately crashed the aging biplane next to a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico.

Seconds later Pabel Puig and his younger brother Judel were in the water, pulling the other eight Cubans out of the wreckage.

The Soviet-built biplane floated for a few minutes, and everyone--including three children--got out. “Go! Swim for the boat,” Judel, 23, shouted to Pabel, looking toward the lifeboat that had been lowered by the cargo ship’s crew.

Pabel Puig, 28, turned and swam for the boat, just yards away, he said Thursday. “And when I turned around, my brother was gone. I couldn’t see him.”

Through tears, Puig offered that dramatic account of Tuesday’s plane crash off the west coast of Cuba after U.S. immigration officials released him and five other survivors to Miami relatives.

Neither Puig, pilot Angel Lenin Iglesias Hernandez, their two sons or schoolteacher Jacqueline Viera spoke directly to reporters who gathered to see them outside a county refugee health center in Little Havana. Puig’s account was related by his father, Isidro Puig, and the family’s attorney, Ralph E. Fernandez.

“He is overwhelmed, barely able to speak,” said Isidro Puig, a Hialeah mechanic. “This is bittersweet. I lost a son, but one has been saved. I am happy and sad at the same time.”

Two other survivors of the crash, Rodolfo Fuentes, 36, and his wife, Liliana Ponzoa, remained in a Key West hospital Thursday. Their 6-year-old son, Andy, is in the care of relatives there.

Although the release of the Cubans by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service strongly indicates that they will be permitted to remain in the United States--as are most Cubans who reach land--that decision has not been made, U.S. officials said.

Nor is it clear whether the pilot, who worked as a crop duster in Pinar del Rio province, will face air piracy charges, which the Cuban government said are warranted. A report Thursday in Granma, the official Communist Party daily, called the flight “more than a hijacking, it was air piracy to commandeer an airplane destined to fumigate and fertilize fields of rice, a basic food for our people.”

The defection is sure to be on the table today in New York as representatives of the Cuban government and the Clinton administration begin a second day of previously scheduled immigration talks. “The worst part about this act is that it took place hours before migration talks” between the two nations, the Cuban government said in Granma.

The decision to flee Cuba in the single engine Antonov An-2 was at least days in the making, although the elder Puig said he had no knowledge that his sons were planning to defect. He last saw them seven years ago when he visited Cuba.

After tricking his co-pilot to get out of the plane, Iglesias picked up the others on the far side of the Herradura airport in western Cuba and took off. But without charts or radar, Fuentes apparently became disoriented over the Gulf of Mexico.

He radioed the Havana tower to report that he had been hijacked and asked for the coordinates of his location. But, according to Pabel Puig, Cuban authorities refused to help.

“They told us to crash into the sea,” Pabel Puig said, according to Fernandez, who met with the survivors inside the Miami clinic where they were undergoing medical exams.

And crash the plane is what Iglesias did, after circling the freighter Chios Dream several times to alert the crew. The survivors, along with the body of Judel Puig, were taken aboard the freighter, which then headed for Key West.

The Coast Guard took eight of the Cubans off the freighter Wednesday. Fuentes, the most seriously injured, earlier had been airlifted off the Chios Dream. An autopsy was to determine the cause of Judel Puig’s death.

Fernandez and colleague Roberto Villasante, who specializes in aviation law, said that, if Cuban air traffic controllers did refuse to help, they could be in violation of the Chicago Convention of the International Civil Aviation Treaty. That convention requires air traffic controllers to assist all aircraft in distress.

“We fully intend to follow up on that,” said Fernandez.

Meanwhile, in Key West the Americanization of Andy Fuentes had begun. He was taken to Burger King for lunch, outfitted in a new red track suit and later was seen on local television trying out new in-line skates.

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.