Saying the debris was recovered from well within Cuban territory, state-run television displayed photos of navigation charts and other items purportedly recovered from two downed U.S. civilian planes.
Overall, Cuba handled a Feb. 24 incursion by the Cuban-American group's planes "with good judgment and professionalism," Sunday's television broadcast concluded.The Noticiero Nacional de Television report offered Cuba's most comprehensive chronology yet of the events preceding the shooting, but did little to clarify the dispute over where the planes were shot down.
A MiG-29 fighter jet shot down the planes from the Florida-based Brothers to the Rescue, killing the four pilots and prompting a retaliatory tightening of sanctions by the United States.
The group and U.S. authorities say the incident occurred outside Cuban airspace, which extends 12 miles from the coast, as do Cuba's territorial waters. Cuba has said the shootdown occurred within its airspace.
According to the television report, the planes were warned they were approaching a "danger zone" and a pilot responded that "we are ready" to enter it "as free Cubans."
Both countries mounted searches for possible survivors and wreckage after the shooting.
A day after the shooting, Cuban searchers recovered a satchel, navigation charts and a plug-in battery charger 9.3 miles north of the coast, the report said.
The report cited previous penetrations of Cuba's airspace, and said that beginning Feb. 19, Cuba had notified international aviation authorities that "danger zones" would be in effect from Feb. 21-28, from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. daily.
Sunday's report didn't describe the "danger zone," although an illustration accompanying the report suggested it could extend beyond Cuba's territorial waters to the north up to the 24th parallel, about halfway between Cuba and the Florida Keys.
Sunday's chronology records a conversation with a third plane, flown by Brothers to the Rescue leader Jose Basulto, which the United States agrees violated Cuban airspace and got away before the shootings.
The Cuban transcript begins with Cuban controllers detecting one unidentified aircraft northwest of Havana at 10:16 a.m. Five minutes later, another aircraft was spotted north of Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana.