Man, They Almost Built a Fake Cuba
So many hijackers kept demanding "take me to Cuba" that the feds reportedly considered building a fake Havana airport in Florida just to trick them. They never built it. Should've.
So I’m sitting here, nursing a White Russian, minding my own business, and I fall down one of those internet rabbit holes you fall down when you’re not really looking for anything, just abiding, and I come across a number that stops me mid-sip. Between 1961 and 1972, this country had over 150 hijacked flights1. A hundred and fifty. In 1969 alone, forty planes got hijacked. Forty. That’s not an anomaly, man, that’s a bowling league. That’s a recurring Tuesday night thing.
And here I am thinking the ‘70s were rough because of gas lines and bad haircuts. Turns out the whole decade the country was quietly falling apart at thirty thousand feet and nobody really talks about it anymore. This aggression, as I understand it, did not stand. It just kept happening. Weekly, some years.
Here’s the part that really got me though. It wasn’t random chaos. It was practically a genre. Guy gets on a plane, guy pulls something out of his coat, guy says take me to Havana, and the pilot, presumably sighing the sigh of a man who has done this exact bit four times already this month, just turns the plane around. It got so common it became a national punchline. Johnny Carson was probably doing Cuba jokes on a loop. The FBI reportedly considered building the country an escape valve, a fake airport in South Florida, dressed up to look like Havana, specifically so hijackers would land there instead of in actual, real, communist Cuba.
I had to sit with that one a minute. The White Russian helped.
Walter, obviously, has feelings about this, because Walter has feelings about everything that reminds him of institutional failure, which is everything. “This is not ‘Nam, Dude, this is commercial aviation. There are rules. You don’t just let a man walk on a plane with a pistol and reroute it to a Caribbean dictatorship because he asked nicely. Do you know what would’ve happened if a guy pulled that in ‘Nam? He would’ve been dealt with. There’d have been a process.” Walter, my friend, there was a process. The process was turning the plane around and hoping the guy calmed down before Havana. That was the whole security apparatus. A hope and a change of destination.
Donny, bless him, was uncharacteristically the smartest guy in the room on this one. He just kind of shrugged and went, “why didn’t they just, like, paint a fake airport somewhere, so the guy thinks he’s in Cuba but he’s actually still in Florida?” And nobody responded, because nobody ever responds to Donny, that’s the whole tragedy of the man, out of his element even when he’s dead center in it. Except this time, Donny, you beautiful out-of-his-depth bowler, that’s genuinely what they considered doing. The federal government of the United States sat in a room and seriously discussed constructing an entire fake Cuban airport as a piece of Cold War theater, purely to fool guys with guns into thinking they’d made it to Havana when really they’d just landed forty-five minutes down the coast. That’s not a bit. That’s an actual proposal that actual grown men in suits actually floated.
Can you imagine being that hijacker? You’ve committed federal crimes, pulled a weapon on a flight crew, sweated through your shirt for six hours over the Gulf, and you step off the plane triumphant, ready to defect, ready for your new communist life, and it’s just... Florida. With some cardboard palm trees and a guy in a guayabera shirt hired for the day. Man, that’s a worse gut punch than finding out your rug, the one that really tied the whole room together, got peed on by a couple of nihilists over a case of mistaken identity involving a bowling league and a millionaire’s trophy wife. At least I knew immediately I’d been wronged. This guy would’ve had to find out slowly, over the course of an afternoon, standing in a parking lot that definitely did not look like Revolutionary Cuba no matter how hard everyone was trying.
They never actually built it, as far as anybody can tell. Which is honestly a little disappointing. I would have liked to have seen it. Would’ve liked to have bowled a few frames in the shadow of a plywood Havana International, personally.
Instead, on January 5th, 1973, the FAA just did the boring, obvious thing they probably should have done a decade earlier: mandated screening for every passenger and every carry-on at every airport in the country. Metal detectors. Bag checks. The whole rigmarole we now shuffle through half asleep, shoes in one bin, laptop in another, a guy behind you sighing because you forgot about the water bottle. And just like that, hijackings basically stopped. Went from about one every two weeks to almost none within a couple years. No fake Cuba required. No elaborate Cold War theater. Just somebody finally deciding to check the bags.
That’s the whole story, man. The government’s first instinct was an entire fabricated nation-state, built out of plywood and hope, and the actual answer was sitting right there the whole time, in a metal detector at a hardware store. Sometimes the universe hands you the easy fix and you spend a decade trying to build a fake country instead. I don’t know what that says about the human condition, or the federal government, or me personally, but I do know it’s a lot to think about on an empty stomach, and I have not eaten today.
The Dude abides. And eventually, so did airport security. Took ‘em a minute, though.
I was researching political violence as part of a series on my other more serious page for a series on the backlash from the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and this popped out.