We Take the First Commercial Flight from Key West to Havana in 54 Years

By Mark Howell

 

Konk Life flew into history on Monday by participating in the first commercial airplane flight from Key West airport to Havana, Cuba in more than 50 years.

 

This year is also the centenary of the first-ever flight from Key West to Cuba by Rosillo del Toro.

 

On the morning of December 30 this week, your reporter was selected to join Key West Mayor Craig Cates in a commercially chartered flight from Key West and back.

 

We returned elated from the trouble-free experience and a notably openhearted reception that we received from personnel at Jose Marti airport.

 

The plane we traveled in was a 10-seat, twin-prop Cessna 441 belonging to Ed Knight of Key West (currently on a cruise to Antigua) and his Executive Air charter company. Our pilot was the exceptionally experienced Joe Lamroult, his co-pilot was the equally excellent Dwain Coker.

 

We would fly the stone’s throw to our nearest big-city neighbor at 10,00 feet averaging 274 mph.

 

Once the airport director, Peter Horton, had rolled out the red carpet down the steps and the aircraft was blessed by Father Baker of St. Mary’s — “May life be good for all” — the trip dubbed Flight 130 went ahead by virtue of the first permit issued by the Cuban government to land a plane in Havana from Key West since the revolution.

 

Aboard the plane in addition to Mayor Cates and this reporter was Carolann Sharkey of the Key West Forest and Botanical Garden. Known to be a force of nature herself, with the help of the Marazul travel she managed to jump every considerable hurdle to make the trip happen on behalf of the Tropical Research Ecological Exchange, known as TREE. Also aboard with us were the exchange’s director, Richard Keefe, plus two board members, Jean and Clark Shannon, who’d brought with them a batch of genuine Key Lime pies for the ground crew at the other end. The seventh person aboard was Mercedes Costa who born in Cuba in 1967 and came to the U.S. as an infant; she is director of Caribbean Direct International and 12 years ago began the first cargo flight from Miami to Havana, a system still in place.

 

We left at 9:58 a.m. and arrived after a smooth flight, minus a few bumps from turbulence on the landing approach, at precisely 10:20 a.m.

 

(Del Toro back in May, 1913 — with his pet monkey, incidentally —took two hours and 45 minutes.)

 

The countryside outside Havana, which was all we could glimpse before landing, looked sweetly fertile, its gently rolling limestone sustaining a rich cover of green grasses and tan foliage. The only unbending things were the occasional railroad tracks; the roads all roamed and twisted. Not a sign of urban sprawl anywhere.

 

On landing, we coasted toward Terminal 2, which Mercedes says copes with 15 flights from Miami per day. We passed a rather oriental-looking Terminal 3 that takes the rest of the world. Once disembarked, we felt the atmosphere to be distinctly thicker and warmer than our own island’s ambient air. But then, of course, as we all agree in a kind of rapture, we were that much closer to the Equator.

 

A small, casual welcoming party arrived, including a group of suited Havana Tour reps and a yellow-jacketed airport employee whose ID tagged him as Eduardo Mesa. Eduardo was very personable and took a sharp interest in all of us. Mayor Cates gently presented him with a medallion embossed with the words Conch Republic. “Conch?” says Eduardo. “They have that in the Bahamas.” He later passed this memento along to his superior, apparently the thing to do, so the mayor, to his delight, gave him another for him to keep.

 

We sauntered about the tarmac while our papers were assembled and the mood between both our nationalities grew perceptibly ebullient. The mayor concurred that he hardly felt quite this uplifted since we both repaired to his daughter and son-in-law’s Conch Town premises on North Roosevelt to celebrate his first mayoral victory after being endorsed by Solares Hill.

 

The other passengers from Key West would be staying in Havana for a few days of botanical business, while the two who’d soon be returning, namely the mayor and this reporter, were eventually escorted to the terminal for such business as a visit to the baños (bathroom). This required we go through the first security check of the trip. Total politeness on the staff’s part, all of them sweetly patient as we emptied our pockets. Everything in the facility was spotless. The mood was good. And no armed guards, that’s a fact.

 

The duty-free store had no Bacardi rum on its shelves (Bacardi was appropriated after the revolution) but plenty of Russian vodka. And Guantanamera cigars.

 

The plane ride back home went by in flash but gave us a chance to come up with the following full disclosure:

 

The mayor’s grandmother was born in Cuba and Cates’ s mom spoke fluent Spanish as a result, becoming an interpreter for the Cuban government in the 1970s; she was also the president of the San Carlos Institute in Key West before Rafael Penalver.

 

Cate’s himself first visited Havana as a child, when he and his sister accompanied their parents on holiday there. He recalls hawkers selling tourists local birds in little cages.

 

This reporter too had visited Cuba once before, in the late 1970s as a visitor from Canada at a resort called Don Lino near Holguin; a different Cuba with many roadside billboard’s written in Russian.

 

And my wife Jan’s grandfather helped establish the National City Bank in Cuba and met her grandmother in Havana.

 

So: It really is a small world. This week we were privileged to enjoy it immensely. And hopefully soon, you can too.

 

Tomorrow in Havana!

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