Madrid/The only survivor of the Cubana de Aviación plane crash in 2018 has expressed her satisfaction at the conviction against Global Air in Mexico, published this Wednesday by the local press. “May JUSTICE be the word that honors next May 18 after eight years of so much suffering and uncertainty,” he wrote on his Instagram account. Facebook Mailen Díaz Almaguer from Holguín, who is now 27 years old and suffers very serious physical consequences from that event.
The sentence, which is not yet final, does not initially benefit the Cuban, although it opens a path for new claims. The judge has sentenced the airline company Global Air (Aerolíneas Damojh), contracted by Cubana de Aviación, to pay compensation of 7.12 million dollars (124.2 million pesos) to the families of the four crew members who lost their lives in the accident. Those affected are those close to the flight attendants María Daniela Ríos Rodríguez, Abigail Hernández García and Guadalupe Beatriz Limón García, and the maintenance technician Marco Antonio López Pérez.
Each of the families must receive 1.5 million dollars for moral damages and almost 270,000 dollars for property damages, a total of just over 1.7 million. In addition, the company must pay a surcharge of 9% annual interest when the ruling is final, although at the moment it can be challenged by a court of appeals in civil matters.
Each of the families must receive 1.5 million dollars for moral damages and almost 270,000 dollars for property damages, a total of just over 1.7 million.
“The existence of damage is proven, since the defendant Damojh Airlines, with the trade name Global Air, caused fatal damage to its crew, responsibility that is proven according to the expert opinion,” the ruling indicates. “In the opinion of the third party specialist, the accident of the aircraft with Mexican registration XA-UHZ had characteristics of an institutional accident, conceived within the organization of the defendant Aerolíneas Damojh.”
According to Samuel González Ruiz, the families’ lawyer, during the process it was discovered that the maintenance records were falsified “and that there was even a flight ban that was ignored.”
The accident occurred on May 18, 2018, when a Boeing 737-200 plane of the company, chartered by Cubana de Aviación to cover the route between Havana and Holguín, crashed as soon as it took off one kilometer from the José Martí airport. 112 people died in it and Díaz Almaguer, who was 19 years old at the time, survived.
The report prepared by the airline indicated that there was a “human error” by the pilots, who took off with “a very steep angle of climb,” while the Cuban Civil Aviation Institute (IACC) considered that they were “speculations.”
Manuel Rodríguez, general director of Global Air, explained in a statement that the investigations by the Cuban authorities confirmed the conclusions of his company’s report and that the pilots’ error created “a lack of lift that resulted in the crash of the aircraft.”
Rodríguez also accused the Mexican authorities of having suspended the activities of his company after the accident in an “illegal” manner and motivated by the “incompetence and bad faith” of four officials and two former workers. A former pilot and a former flight attendant denounced at that time that the accident “was something announced” due to the “absolutely unsafe conditions” in which the company flew.
“It was something announced,” told the press the former worker Myrna Díaz. “In 80% of the trips we lacked something. We flew without radar and at one time it did not want to lower the landing gear. You get used to it; we became lovers of danger,” he said, while accusing Rodríguez of trying to reduce costs by sacrificing safety.
“On 80% of the trips we lacked something. We flew without radar and sometimes it didn’t want to lower the landing gear. You get used to it; we became lovers of danger”
In 2019, the New Herald He said that Global Air had delivered to the families of the victims –Díaz Almaguer, among them– amounts between 2,000 and 5,000 dollars as payment to “cover immediate needs” and clarified that this did not constitute an acceptance of responsibility and was charged to the final settlement.
A criminal lawsuit is still being filed against Manuel Rodríguez Campos and the company, different from this civil lawsuit, the ruling of which has just been announced. A case of this type foundered in Spain, where the businessman comes from, almost four years ago. The National Court rejected the complaint outright and considered that it was “obvious the difficulty” of charging him with serious imprudence “four years after the incident and far from the scene and without contact with the authorities of both the place of the accident and the country where the company was located.”
In Cuba there are no precedents for compensation for plane accidents, although some families stated that they had held meetings in which they were offered a small amount to help with paperwork. The parents of one of the deceased had to sign a document stating that they had not made a claim in any way and were given 5,000 pesos in freely convertible currency (less than 5,000 dollars).
