14ymedio, Havana, 24 October 2018 – Cubana de Aviación announced on Wednesday the restoration of three of its domestic routes starting on October 28. In a statement, the airline reported that air links will resume between Havana and the cities of Guantánamo, Baracoa and Camagüey.
Ticket sales are available in the sales offices as of this past Monday, as confirmed to this newspaper by the commercial office of Cubana de Aviación in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood.
The flights to Guantanamo, with a price of 228 CUP (Cuban pesos, roughly $9 US), will leave every Wednesday and Sunday, while those going to Baracoa, which will cost 270 pesos, will depart on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The frequency of the route to Camagüey, whose ticket price is 138 CUP, will be reduced to a single trip per week every Tuesday.
A worker from one of the commercial offices where the tickets for these routes are sold confirmed to 14ymedio that prices are still the same as those in effect prior to the cancellation of these routes.
The information desk of the company at the José Martí International Airport in Havana also informed this newspaper that the routes will be covered with model ATR 72-500 aircraft.
The airline has announced that it will gradually inform about the restoration of other national routes “in accordance with the normalization of conditions in each destination”.
The company refers in this manner to the suspension of all flights in the national territory that took place at the end of March of this year due to the lack of aircraft to cover the routes within the country.
At that time news of the cancellation of the flights took time to broadcast in the national media and the airline also did not report the situation quickly, which caused uncertainty among travelers who had a ticket to fly on Cubana de Aviación.
In the past, as a result of customer complaints about partial cancellations of departing flights, airline executives have had to face criticism, citing that “the technical problems of the aircrafts” are the main causes of delays and cancellations.
On May 18, a month and a half after the cancellation of all domestic flights, a Boeing 737 of the Mexican airline Global Air, and leased by Cubana de Aviación, crashed shortly after takeoff from Havana airport while heading to Holguin. In the accident, 112 of the 113 people traveling on board died, including passengers and crew.
Translated by Wilfredo Díaz Echevarria
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