Deadly hijacking attempt reflects younger Cubans' discontent

HAVANA — The Cuban military officer killed by a pair of escaped army recruits was buried with his country's full military honors Friday. Army Lt. Col. Victor Ibo Acuña Velazquez, 41, was laid to rest in the western provincial capital of Pinar del Rio and posthumously awarded the Antonio Maceo Medal of Valor, the island's top military honor.

Acuña, a communications engineer, was among eight people held hostage for at least four hours aboard a plane on the tarmac at Jose Marti International Airport and was killed while trying to disarm one of the three young army deserters, all conscripts from the eastern province of Camaguey.

Cuba analysts said the deadly hijacking attempt reflected the discontent among the island's young people. More than 20 percent of Cuba's 11.4 million people were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the economic hardship that followed the fall of Cuba's once-powerful benefactor. At least one-third of the nearly 1 million Cubans who have left the island for the U.S. since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 did so after 1999, according to a Pew study of U.S. Census data.

"These were 19-, 21-year-old kids, and they obviously felt extreme desperation that they were willing to take those risks," said Brian Latell, a Cuba analyst and author of "After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader."

A government statement said the American policy of letting most Cubans stay if they reach U.S. soil encourages violent attempts to leave this island, such as Thursday's incident that led to the fatal shooting of Acuña Velazquez by the two army deserters.

The headline in the Communist Party newspaper called the hijacking attempt an "act of terror promoted by the United States."

The two hijackers were among the three conscripts who deserted their base last Saturday, killing an army guard with stolen automatic rifles. The escape sparked a massive manhunt, which ended in a blaze of gunfire on the tarmac as two of the recruits tried to hijack a plane to the United States.

The gunmen were captured later, and the other hostages were unharmed.

The government statement said the third deserter also had been captured, but it provided few details.

The conscripts, all from the eastern province of Camaguey, were identified as Leandro Cerezo Sirut and Alain Forbus Lameru, both 19, and Yoan Torres Martinez, 21. It was unclear which two were involved in the attempted hijacking.

Capital punishment in Cuba, always carried out by firing squad, has been used sparingly in recent years. But the death penalty seemed likely in this case.

Four years ago, three men arrested for the armed hijacking of a Cuban passenger ferry were sentenced to death by a civilian tribunal and sent before a firing squad just nine days after that incident — even though no one had been killed. The executions in April 2003 were protested by governments and human-rights groups worldwide.

Thursday's hijacking attempt was the first involving a Cuban plane since 2003, when an architect commandeered an airliner on a domestic flight and diverted it to the U.S. by brandishing fake grenades. A U.S. court convicted him and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.