Posted on 12/11/2002 5:50:50 PM PST by fone
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Montreal - A Cuban man who hid in the wheel compartment of a DC-10 jet wrapped his shirt around heating pipes to survive temperatures of nearly 40 below zero and avoid falling out during the four-hour flight to Canada.
"I consider myself very lucky to have survived. Thank God," the stowaway, in his 20s, said Monday night after his first appearance before the refugee panel.
The man, who cannot be identified by name under a publication ban imposed by Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, has been ordered held until a hearing Friday.
Robert Gervais, a spokesman for the Citizenship and Immigration Department, said the man could be granted conditional release while he seeks refugee status, similar to political asylum in the United States.
"Concerning his refugee claim, that will be heard by the refugee board probably several months from now," Gervais said yesterday.
Canada adheres to the U.N. convention on refugees in deciding such cases, requiring a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, nationality, religion, political belief or social affiliation.
An airport worker at the Havana airport, the man climbed into the wheel well of Cubana Flight 170 before it departed for Cayo Coco resort en route to Montreal last Friday.
During the flight, he said, he embraced a heating pipe, wrapping his shirt around it to hold on and get as much warmth as possible. Aviation experts say the temperature in the hold probably was around minus 40 degrees with little oxygen at an altitude of 30,000 feet.
"I kept my face close to it [the pipe], and that helped me to breathe," he told news channel LCN.
"I thought that certain parts of my body would freeze. But when the airplane descended, I warmed up."
© 2002 The Plain Dealer.
It's awful when certain body parts freeze.
If that's not a scathing indictment of Cuba's political and economic system(s), I dunno what is!
Technically, that can't be done. He will NOT be seized from his relatives' house by gun-toting agents, because Clinton and Reno are not in power any more.
I was applying a looser definition -- something along the lines of "forcibly repatriated to Castro's Paradise".
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