Cuba?

[LSThiker]

So I found this article from February 1960, any one know more details:

A Cuban official said two U.S. fliers were killed Thursday in a plane crash as they attempted to set sugar cane fields afire with incendiary bombs.

One flier was identified from documents in his pockets as Robert Kelly, a member of the U. S. Civil Air Patrol, officials said.

In another article from a different newspaper in a different location, it stated:

CAP Headquarters in Houston, Tex., said its records listed two Robert Kellys as members, but the families of both men said they were in the United States and were not connected in any way with the Cuban incident."

Nothing else seems to have been boiled from this.

[sardak]

The plane, a Piper Comanche, crashed on February 18, 1960. Apparently, one of the incendiary devices went off in the plane during the bombing run. On television, Fidel Castro identified the pilot as Robert Ellis Frost, of Eugene, Oregon, and displayed his US passport. Frost also had an ID from the Utah State Civil Defense Council. Castro said the second person found in the wreckage was Kelly.

About 10 days after the crash, news articles reported that the second person onboard had been identified as Heriberto Onelio Santana Roque.

How Robert Kelly, member of CAP, was initially identified as the second person on the plane will probably never be known. There must have been something found in the wreckage with his name, which of course, raises other questions.

The day after the crash the US State Department apologized publically to the Castro government for the incident. The State Department spokesman said the plane took off from Tamiami Airport in Florida, flew south to an unidentified airfield to pick up bombing material, then flew to Cuba. Frost had  filed a "required" flight plan which stated the flight would be entirely within the US. Some news articles noted that the plane had been reported overdue. Others reports say that this was the third bombing run by Frost. The director of the Utah Defense Council confirmed that a Robert E. Frost had been issued an ID card by the council as a member of a volunteer SAR team.

Ancestry.com, the genealogy conglomerate, has among its online collections, "Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835-1974." There are 30 or so pages of documents about Frost and this incident. These include telegrams between the State Department and Frost's wife and parents, as well as the Cuban accident report which identifies the second person as Roque. The most documentation concerns what to do with Mr. Frost. The Cubans refused to bury him or ship the body back to the US, keeping him in the morgue. In September, seven months after the crash, the State Department notified the family that the Court ordered Mr. Frost buried as an "unknown person." The message states that after an "appropriate interval" the US Embassy would work to have the record corrected.

The name Robert Kelly doesn't appear in any of the Frost documents, nor in a search of deaths in Cuba in this timeframe. Reflecting this dark time in history, there are State Department reports of Americans in Cuba killed by firing squad.

Mike

[Private Investigator]

That was very interesting.