Several airlines connecting Cuba and Nicaragua began suspending their charter flights three days after the United States announced penalties for airlines operating the route.
A source from a Miami-based travel agency that specializes in marketing tickets between the island and the Central American country confirmed to 14ymedio this Friday that currently Conviasa and Aruba Airlines are the only airlines that connect the two nations that Air Century and Sky High have canceled all flights planned for the coming months.
Air Century officials reiterated to Telemundo 51 that company’s decision to stop flying the commercial route often used by migrants from the island to travel to the southern border of the United States.
On Tuesday, the State Department said in a statement that charter airlines had sold tickets at “extortionate prices” to those using Nicaragua as an access route to Mexico’s northern border.
“The world collapsed on me today. My flight has been canceled twice now and this time it was final.”
The penalty is that “owners, managers and/or senior officials of companies offering charter flights to Nicaragua” protected by the Immigration and Nationality Law and persons carrying out activities subject to sanctions are exempted from the issuance of a Visas for the United States are barred by the government Americans cannot enter the country.
Air Century, said the source, who works at a travel agency in Miami, “is organizing some rescue flights to pick up people who wanted to leave Cuba in the few remaining days of November.”
“The world collapsed on me today. It has happened twice before (my flight was canceled) and this time it was final,” a Cuban resident of the island told Telemundo 51, who planned to travel soon with Air Century and her flight was canceled mid-this week. The woman’s only hope was to be relocated by the agency where she bought the ticket to fly with another airline.
Days before the Joe Biden administration announced visa restrictions on operators of these flights, two US officials warned that the measure was being prepared. One of them was Eric Jacobstein, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said his government was “aware of these reports of an increase in charter flights from several countries arriving in Nicaragua, and we believe no one is taking advantage of them should.” the desperation of vulnerable migrants.
Between 2021 and 2023, more than 425,000 Cubans arrived at Mexico’s southern border en route to the United States. The route through Nicaragua has made it possible to avoid an even worse route, that of crossing the Darién jungle between Colombia and Panama, which many took in the previous migration crisis of 2015.
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