Last week, news broke that Tampa International Airport is losing one of its three Cuba charter carriers and two of its five weekly flights to the island nation.
XAEL Charters Inc. will discontinue its Tampa-Havana flights on Feb. 14, and ABC Charters Tampa-Holguin flights will cease on Feb. 28. Both companies are based in South Florida.
The reduction of flights is disappointing for the airport and for those who support legal U.S. to Cuba travel, which is currently restricted to Americans who have family members in Cuba, as well as for journalists, academics and people on humanitarian missions. Others have long found ways around the prohibition, often entering Cuba from Mexico or Canada.
One of the leading advocates for enhancing economic relations between the U.S. and the Communist Island, Al Fox, said he's not surprised to hear about the reduction in flights.
"I'm not surprised at all," he told CL Wednesday morning. "Last fall I was telling a lot of people that. And I called several reporters that wrote articles saying that Tampa was now the second largest city in the U.S. after Miami of travelers to Cuba. What they did not take into account is that a lot of those travelers were repeat travelers, because of the novelty of it."
Fox also disputed the notion that most of the flights to Cuba were packed.
"None of those flights — with one or two exceptions — were ever at capacity. None. They were never full. A lot of them said they were full. Now they admit they weren't," he said. "Even a tertiary study would show that Tampa could not sustain seven flights a week, just with Cuban-Americans."
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2013.