Havana

Havana is presented as a destination for hijacked American flights and as a point of escape in Juan’s account of earlier radical activity. Rather than depicting the city directly, the novel makes it present through reported routes, scattered news reports, and the possibility of reaching Cuba by turning an ordinary passenger plane into a means of departure.

Havana as a Destination

During a rainstorm, as the group discusses the limits of having only one gun, Juan recalls that people had hijacked flights bound for Havana. He describes the plane as a setting where one weapon could exert unusual leverage, because passengers’ safety gave the hijacker’s demands force. The city thus enters the conversation not as a distant abstraction but as the endpoint of a practicable escape route.

Juan’s Account of Earlier Hijackings

Juan recounts what a friend on the East Coast told him about helping two men leave the country after they had blown up a Dow Chemical plant. The friend drove them to the airport; later, listening to Liberation News Service, he heard that their flight had been diverted to Havana. Juan says he initially doubted the story, then repeated his friend’s research and found reports of successful hijackings buried in the back pages of newspapers. In his account, the larger stories about failed attempts drew attention, while successful diversions received little notice.

Concealment and the Possibility of Escape

Juan attributes the obscurity of these journeys to overlapping institutional interests: airlines did not want to advertise how easily a flight could be hijacked, the government did not want to publicize how many people sought to go to Cuba, and newspapers did not foreground the successful diversions. He estimates that there had been between ten and twenty hijackings to Havana a year, though fewer by the time of the conversation, four or five years after the episode he recalls. The figures and explanation are presented as Juan’s account, not as an independently narrated history.

The anecdote changes the force of the group’s immediate predicament. Juan’s earlier complaint that one gun leaves comrades exposed gives way to a concrete example of how a single weapon might enable escape; the destination makes that possibility legible. Havana therefore functions in the scene as both a real endpoint in Juan’s story and an imagined route out of the group’s dangerous present.