This morning’s “Freedom Flight” from Cuba will be airborne for thirty minutes. Its scheduled ETA in Miami is 10:10 Eastern Standard Time.
The film, narrated by Academy Award winning actor José Ferrer and directed by USIA producer Ash Hawken, documents the experiences of Cuban-American refugees seeking asylum in the United States after Fidel Castro’s 1959 establishment of a Communist regime on the island of Cuba. Filmed in 1970, 10:10 EST was originally a part of the “Ahora” Series, programmed on TV networks throughout Latin America. It was later adapted for worldwide distribution in multiple languages. Its English version is presented here.
In spite of frigid diplomatic relations between Castro’s Cuba and the U.S. Government in 1965, the sides were able to negotiate the “Freedom Flight” program, authorizing two daily flights from Cuba, carrying asylum seekers to the United States. Until the program was terminated in 1973, an estimated 300,000 men women and children had taken the thirty-minute flight from Varadero Airport in Cuba to the Miami International Airport. They arrived with what they could carry. There was no checked luggage. Most had waited two years for their names to appear on the flight manifest. As each stepped into the cabin of a Freedom Flight in Cuba, all family possessions were immediately confiscated by Castro’s government. He referred to the exiles as “gusanos,” worms.
At the time, a commonly held belief in Latin America was that most people fleeing Castro’s Cuba were wealthy business owners or the intellectual and social elite. There was truth to that perception for early tranches of Cuban emigration but, by the beginning of the Freedom Flights, seats were filled with disaffected Cubans from all walks of life. Motivation for the film’s production was to bring that reality into focus and provide a human face to the growing Cuban exile community in the United States.
Although most new arrivals would remain in Florida, there to begin to build upon the state’s current Cuban-American population of some 1.5 million people, others would venture out into the neighborhoods of a larger America. 10:10 EST profiles some of those pioneers. Its cameras follow their daily challenges of integration into a new and different life.
As Eastern Airlines Flight #8584 leaves Cuba at 9:40AM, it is three time zones earlier in San Francisco California, where a Cuban refugee miner is beginning his day of tunneling under the city for a new subway line. As #8584’s pilots sight the shores of Key West, it is nearing the lunch hour in Puerto Rico, where a Cuban-American camera team is wrapping up a film shoot in Old San Juan. In historic New Orleans, a recently arrived Cuban cabinet maker is turning on his power saw in the crafts center where he has set up shop. He is blind. In Gary Indiana, the B-Turn shift at the Inland Steel Company is winding down, and its chief, a Cuban refugee, is heading home for welcome sleep. As the Captain of Flt. #8584 locks into a landing path, viewers enter into the lives of a Cuban cigar maker, a butcher, a bar tender and an Episcopal priest who moved his ministry from the tropical sun of Cuba to the chill of a Midwest winter. In Oregon, class is just beginning for the former Castro family lawyer who fled Cuba to farm in Oregon and teach classes at a nearby Community College.
From these early settlers, there grew communities of Cuban Americans in all of the states and territories of the United States. In 2021 there are some 2.5 million Cuban Americans living in the country, many the grandchildren of Freedom Flight arrivals. Today, as we cinematically greet the arrival of Flight# 8584, we welcome each of its eighty-one passengers to the soil of America; Cubans who chose freedom and the opportunity to build lives in their new country.
¡Bienvendos!
Credits for “10:10 EST” can be accessed here.
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