Struggles during the Special Period

SACTA's Soviet-built fleet, 1970s-1990s

*The airline's Soviet fleet during the aformentioned time period also included the Antonov An-26 and Yakovlev Yak-42, both of which have been omitted from this image for the time being due to a lack of designated aircraft templates.

As of March 1990, SACTA had 5,658 employees and its fleet consisted of 12 An-24s, 26 Antonov An-26s, four Il-18s, 11 Ilyushin Il-62Ms, two Il-76s, eight Tupolev Tu-154s (five Tu-154B2s and three Tu-154Ms), and 12 Yakovlev Yak-40s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, SACTA faced formidable challenges when it came to improving passenger experience. Substantial flight delays, sometimes lasting for days, and spotty service marred SACTA's attempts to attract passengers to what was essentially an archaic company operating according to Soviet-era standards. To make matters worse, technical deficiencies and low staff morale added to the airline's difficulties as it tried to compete for passengers in Canada, Western Europe, and Latin America. A series of fatal accidents in the 1990s compounded SACTA's mountain of troubles, leading to a negative reputation among many travellers. Beyond these problems, occasional hijackings of SACTA's domestic flights also made it difficult to improve the airline's image and its competitive position against other carriers flying to Cuba.

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, SACTA faced another new and unexpected challenge with anonymous U.S.-based individuals and groups (often using multiple online pseudonyms, false identities, and claiming to have been SACTA passengers) systematically and regularly flooding travel-related websites, online forums and blogs with negative comments and false statements about SACTA's services and aircraft. Travel websites, forums, and blogs based in multiple countries were usually targeted, especially those served by SACTA. Events that typically go unnoticed when they happen in U.S. airlines would be falsely exaggerated and distorted sensationally in travel-related blogs and forums when occurred on SACTA flights. When SACTA opened its own website in 1997, it was faced with denial-of-service attacks by U.S.-based hackers that frequently closed all access to the site. These and other frequent hacking attacks prevented SACTA from setting up online payment channels for reservations and ticketing, causing additional difficulties and losses for the airline. An additional related problem in this area was the still-ongoing total prohibition of any payments to SACTA (and other Cuba-based enterprises) with U.S.-based credit or debit cards, bank transfers (electronic or otherwise), and travellers' cheques, all of which greatly complicated setting up any online payment process for the airline. These U.S.-based efforts expanded the U.S. government's longstanding record of damaging the airline by multiple means, which started with the cancellation of landing rights in the early 1960s followed by the imposition of the U.S. embargo on Cuba (in 1962), along with many other actions and measures over the years.