Ritzy Flight to Cuba for Deportees

By Tracey Eaton (alongthemalecon.blogspot.com)

HAVANA TIMES — Some 34,500 Cubans living in the United States face deportation orders. Sending them back to the island would likely cost US taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars if the case of Abraham Gonzalez set the precedent.

In 2010, U.S. authorities deported Gonzalez to Cuba because of a drug-trafficking conviction in 1982, according to a Miami Herald article about his case in 2011.

The Herald said Gonzalez “was put on a plane to Cuba on June 17, 2010.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hired Executive Fliteways, of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., to make an unscheduled charter flight to Havana, Cuba on June 17, 2010. I’ll bet that’s the plane that took Gonzalez back to Cuba.

The Herald said Gonzalez traveled with “several Mariel-era deportees.”

Records show that ICE paid Executive Fliteways $44,538. Let’s suppose there were three or four deportees, three or four federal agents, a pilot and a crew member. They could have climbed aboard Executive Fliteways’ Hawker 800, which seats eight and costs $3,300 per hour.

Or maybe they flew aboard the Falcon 50, which seats nine and costs $4,300 per hour.

Whatever the case, Gonzalez traveled back to Cuba in style.

If the U.S. government were to send all 34,500 Cubans back to the island in similar fashion, the bill would be a cool $384 million.

Editor’s Note: There’s one catch though, Cuba has to be willing to except the deportees.