HAVANA (Reuters) - In the busy summer travel period in Cuba, a long line of people wait for hours in the sweltering heat outside the Havana office of state-owned airline Cubana, many of them eager to visit families in the provinces.
But they are not waiting to book flights. Instead, they hope to get their money back on plane tickets or exchange them for bus tickets across the island.
Cubana, which has a virtual monopoly on domestic flights, has suspended nearly all of them due to a lack of working aircraft, plunging travel on the Caribbean’s largest island into chaos and highlighting problems at what was once a vanguard of Latin American aviation.
The flight suspensions were made a month after a Cubana flight crashed after takeoff from Havana airport in May, killing 112 people. They come at a time when Communist-run Cuba is trying to stimulate tourism, one of the few bright spots in its economy, by promoting beach resorts and colonial towns hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the capital.
“Now I will have to take a 16-hour bus-ride to Guantanamo but what other options do I have?,” said kindergarten teacher Marlene Mendoza, who was bathed in sweat and got a bus ticket to eastern Cuba after queuing for more than seven hours.
Analysts say Cubana’s troubles stem largely from dual ills that afflict the whole state-run economy: the U.S. trade embargo and a problematic business model.
Cubana did not reply to requests for comment for this story.Founded in 1929 as one of Latin America’s first airlines, Cubana was nationalized after Fidel Castro’s leftist 1959 revolution. In its heyday, it flew Cuban
