At face value, they are three old planes not worth much more than their parts and scrap metal.
Stolen from the Cuban government over six months in 2003 - two by hijackers, one by its pilot - all three landed at Key West International Airport, a 185-kilometre flight from Havana to the gleaming shores of the US.
Fidel Castro demanded the planes be returned. Instead, they were seized by US courts to satisfy part of a US$27 million judgment won by a Cuban-American woman who unwittingly married a Cuban spy in Miami.
The story of what happened to the planes since is another chapter in the history of stymied, contentious US-Cuba relations, with the new owners unable to get the planes anywhere.
The first of the three planes to land in Key West was a crop-duster that pilot Nemencio Carlos Alonso Guerra used to fly seven passengers to the US in November 2002.
Cuba wanted the biplane back, but a Florida judge agreed with Ana Margarita Martinez that it should be seized and sold to partially pay the judgment she was awarded under an anti-terrorism law. In 1996, her husband, Juan Pablo Roque, had fled back to Cuba after infiltrating the Miami-based anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue.