Word: betancourts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...uncommon, it was the biggest in recent history. From one end of Castro's Cuba to the other, the police, the armed forces, the secret security, Castro's network of neighborhood spies and "the entire organized populace" searched for more than two weeks. Their quarry: Angel Betancourt Cueto, the flight engineer who tried to hijack a Cubana Airlines plane March 27th and ended up killing the pilot and a guard before leaping from the plane and escaping (TIME, April 8). Last week Castro finally found his man-and with him an excuse to discredit what little remains...
Porous Security. After escaping, Betancourt made his way by foot, train and car or truck to two towns outside Havana, seeking refuge at several farms. Some peasants took him in; others went to the police. After his brother Luis went into Havana to seek a hiding place for the escapee, a bone-weary Betancourt finally slipped back into the city and took refuge in the San Francisco church and convent. There two Franciscan friars agreed, the government charged later, "to hide him, in order later to take him clandestinely out of the country." But government snoopers had got word that...
...government arrested 15 accomplices, including Franciscan Friars Miguel Loredo and Luis Serafin Ajuria, Betancourt's brother, two Cubans who had hidden Betancourt on a farm, five contacts and-in the government's first admission that Betancourt had not acted alone-five plane passengers who had "paid various sums of money to Betancourt so that he would include them on the trip." Fidel Castro blamed the whole unhappy incident on "Yankee imperialist policy that constantly stimulates and pays deserters," but he was clearly even madder that Betancourt had eluded Cuba's porous security system for so long...
Shortly after sunset one evening, a Cubana Airlines Ilyushin-18 took off from Santiago, Cuba's second largest city, bound for Havana with 91 passengers. Among the crew was Flight Engineer Angel Betancourt Cueto, who was prepared to risk his life to escape Cuba. Seventy miles west of Havana. Betancourt made his move. Locking the door that separates the flight deck from the passengers, he suddenly slugged the guard who stood just behind the pilot and copilot and ordered Captain Fernando Alvarez Perez to set a course for Miami. "From this moment," as a government communiqué later described...
...plane neared Key West, four U.S. Navy F-102s streaked aloft to give it the once-over. But it already was curving back toward Cuba. It was long after dark, and the plane was touching down on the runway at Havana's José Marti Airport, when Betancourt caught on to the trick. Angrily, he ordered Alvarez to take off again. When the pilot refused, Betancourt shot him dead and frantically tried to get the plane off the ground himself. But the Ilyushin only roared off the end of the runway and came to rest in a plowed field...