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A Mexican federal judge ordered the airline Global Air to pay 124.2 million Mexican pesos (about 7.1 million dollars) to the families of four crew members who lost their lives in the accident involving the Boeing 737-200 that crashed in Havana on May 18, 2018, the worst air disaster in Cuba in thirty years.
The ruling was issued by the Fourteenth District Civil Judge Thaybelli Ivette Sánchez Rojas in Mexico City, and it orders the reparations for property damage to the families of four Mexican crew members: the flight attendants María Daniela Ríos Rodríguez, Abigail Hernández García, and Guadalupe Beatriz Limón García, and the maintenance technician Marco Antonio López Pérez.
The ruling comes nearly eight years after the tragedy and represents the first definitive judgment for civil compensation in this case, although it only covers four of the 113 people who were on board.
The flight DMJ-0972 of Cubana de Aviación —operated by Global Air under a lease agreement— crashed minutes after taking off from José Martí International Airport en route to Holguín, in a farming area of the municipality of Santiago de Las Vegas, approximately one kilometer from the airport.
Of the 113 people on board, 112 died. There were three initial survivors, all Cuban women in critical condition; two of them passed away shortly after. The only definitive survivor was Mailén Díaz Almaguer, who was 19 years old at the time.
Among the deceased were 101 Cubans and 11 foreigners, including seven Mexicans —six crew members and one tourist—, two Argentinians, and two Sahrawis.
The judicial process against Global Air was long and troubled. Since 2018, the company refused to compensate the families and blamed its own pilots for the accident, stating in a press release from July of that year that the aircraft took off at "a very steep angle of ascent," which resulted in "a lack of lift."
In October 2018, the General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Mexico imposed on Global Air fines of 1.7 million pesos for administrative and maintenance deficiencies identified after the accident. The company initiated a nullity trial to contest the payment.
The final report from the Institute of Civil Aeronautics of Cuba, published in September 2019 with the participation of Cuban, Mexican, American, and European specialists, determined that the most probable cause of the accident was a chain of human errors by the crew, including miscalculations in weight and balance that led to the loss of control during takeoff. The report also noted the low operational standards of the airline.
Relatives of the victims reported from the beginning that the representative of Global Air, Manuel Rodríguez Campos, refused to compensate them.
The company offered payments ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 pesos to the relatives of passengers to cover "immediate economic needs."
The verdict comes at a particularly complex time for the airline: Global Air is facing a bankruptcy process following a commercial contest initiated in 2024 without a settlement agreement with creditors, raising serious doubts about the real possibility of families receiving the compensation mandated by the court.
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