Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
MIAMI - A Cuban woman will be allowed to remain in the United States after she hid in a wooden crate that was flown by a cargo plane from the Bahamas to Miami.
A DHL cargo crew found the woman curled up in the crate the size of a small filing cabinet after workers unloaded it late Tuesday at Miami International Airport.
The woman, in her early 20s, did not need medical treatment. She was taken to an immigration center for processing and was to be released, immigration spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said Wednesday. Her name was not released.
Under the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are usually allowed to stay, while most picked up at sea are sent home.
Federal officials and DHL released no information on how long the woman was in the Bahamas and whether she flew out of Cuba in the crate as well. The U.S. Attorney's Office here had no comment.
The woman shipped herself as cargo "apparently with the assistance of others," said Zach Mann, spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. "Certainly she's lucky to be alive."
The 180-mile, one-hour flight took the plane to an altitude of freezing temperatures for a short time, Mann said.
In March, a man from the Dominican Republic was sent home after he flew to Miami in the wheel well of an American Airlines jet.
In February, a homesick man who shipped himself in a wooden cargo crate from New York to Dallas was fined $1,500 and sentenced to four months of house arrest as an illegal stowaway.