Cubana de Aviación

Cubana De Aviacion is Cubas national and international airline. It serves a network that includes places in the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and Central America as well as Ciudad Mexico, Toronto and Montreal in North America. It's network also includes many domestic destinations. It's base is the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana.

Cubana traces it's beggining back to 1929 when it started as Compania Cubana Nacional De Aviacion Curtis, evidencing it's association with the Curtiss plane making company. In 1932, American airline Pan Am brought over Cubana, and the word Curtis was dropped off. Pan Am and Cubana continued their association until 1946, when the airline was bought over by Cuban interests, and then the word Nacional also came off the airline's name. That year, services to Miami were started using DC-3 airplanes. The Miami route, because of it's political significance, would later prove to be an important part of Cubana's history. In 1954, the air company became fully Cuban owned.

When Fidel Castro came into power, the airline, under Marxist rule, had to drop off all United States routes, including the one to Miami International Airport. In 1959, it changed it's name to Empresa Consolidada Cubana De Aviacion, but the airline was still popularly known just as Cubana. With the US Embargo, the airline had to turn to the Soviet Union to get their airplanes, and the first one that came was the IL-14, a little bit after the embargo began. l-18, An-12 and An-24 soon followed. With the arrival of the Il-62, considered by many experts to be one of the most efficient commercial airliners the Soviet Union built, Cubana was able to start services to Europe in 1974, with flights to Barajas International Airport in Madrid.

During the 1980s, Cubana was one of a group of airlines eagerly awaiting for a lift of the embargo to take place, Miami being a city with a large Cuban community and a potential money maker for Cubana. This, however, did not happen, and Cubana is still eagerly anticipating the moment that happens.

With the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cubana was able to buy western jet-liners, except tose built in the United States. They adquired Airbus A320 equipment and leased a DC-10 from french airline AOM. That plane was lost in a crash at Guatemala City. Cubana also adquired Fokker F-27 planes to reinforce their fleet.

Cubana's Soviet built planes began to suffer from old age, and the fact that spare pieces for those planes' parts were hard to find, and, in part because of that, it suffered a series of fatal accidents during the 1990s, and in 1999, it was voted worst airline of the world by top travelling magazines. Because of that dubious distinction, Cubana is trying to change it's image and get new Airbus jets.