7Cubana has had to adapt to a number of different scenarios, from its early days as a flying club, through the heady days of the 1940s and 1960s, when its nation became America's party island and the country was taken over by Fidel Castro, which turned the politics of the country on its head. Suddenly, Cuba's best friend, the Soviet Union was 6,000 miles away and all connections to its nearest neighbor, the USA, were cut, and the country was, in effect, closed off from the rest of the world. In the 1980s, the country once again began to open to tourism, and in more recent years, relations with the US, but, through all this, Cubana has sought to keep the island connected to the rest of the world, with equipment sourced from both the Soviet Union and Europe. This book will tell the story from the beginning until the present day.