US commercial flights take off for Cuba

Cuban Deputy Transport Minister Eduardo Rodriguez said at a press conference in this capital that Foxx will arrive at the Santa Clara airport and will travel to Havana to hold meetings with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and his Cuban counterpart Adel Yzquierdo.

The US Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx, will travel to Cuba on Wednesday on the first commercial flight between the two countries after more than 50 years of suspension, reported dpa news.

An expected explosion in US tourism to Cuba will likely take years to materialize even after USA airlines resume commercial flights to the Caribbean island this week for the first time since 1961, industry officials said.

The United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations on 20 July 2015.

The flights will come from airports across the country.

Twenty daily routes to Havana are pending, with airlines requesting the USA authorities to triple that number, Rodriguez said.

According to the US Department of Transportation, the airlines designated to fly to the nine Cuban airports – not including Havana – are American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Silver Airways, Southwest Airlines and Sun Country Airlines. In 2015, the Cuban government reported 161,233 Americans visited the island, compared to 91,254 in 2014, and arrivals through June 2016 almost doubled compared with the same period past year.

Seventeen U.S. charter flights land every day in Cuba, but they are expected to gradually succumb to competition from the airlines.

In the last year-and-a-half, Cuba and the United States reopened embassies in Washington and Havana, some American businesses opened operations in Cuba, and USA cruise ships began making ports of call to the island nation.

“While all of the flights are unlikely to operate at capacity, the airlines want to plant their respective flags”, Kavulich said.