Cuban experts are identifying the victims and studying the cause of the crash of a Cuban AeroCaribbean ATR 72/212 airliner that killed all 68 people aboard. 

Flight 883, en route to Havana from Santiago de Cuba, crashed Thursday afternoon in the rural area of Guasimal in Sancti Spiritus province, 400 kilometers east of Havana. 

The passengers and crew included seven Cuban crew members and 33 Cuban passenges, 10 Argentines, seven Mexicans, three Dutch, two Germans, two Austrians, one French, one Japanese, one Venezuelan and one Spaniard. 

The country has the experts and the infrastructure necessary to perform the studies to identify the dead and determine the cause of the crash, according to Jorge González Pérez, a forensic expert quoted by an article in the Granma newspaper on Saturday. 

Cuban authorities said all of the bodies would be transferred to the Legal Medicine Institute in Havana for their identification by experts. 

The black box and voice recording box were recovered from the French-made twin turboprop on Friday at the site, authorities said. 

Crews from the Civil Aviation Institute, the Legal Medicine Institute and the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed forces and the Interior Ministry were involved in the recovery work. 

It was the worst plane accident in Cuba since 1989 when a Soviet-made Ilyushin-62 of Cubana de Aviación crashed after taking off from Havana International Airport, killing all 120 on board and a score on the ground. 

Miguel Acebo Cortiñas, first secretary of the Communist Party in Sancti Spiritus province, praised the response of nearby residents, who decisively contributed to locating the plane, opening the way for rescue workers to get to the remote site covered with thorny brush, and keeping the site intact, Granma reported. 

Neighbors interviewed by an NBC news reporter described how they watched the pilot, Captain Angel Villa Martínez, struggle to veer the plane away from the town. It went down about four miles away. 

"We all would have been killed, if not for the pilot," neighbor Caridad Fernandez told NBC on Friday. 

When the plane crashed, hundreds of residents ran with machetes to carve a path to the crash site, hacking through the thick vegetation for five hours. They guided the fire trucks and Civil Defense bulldozers through the thorny brush, neighbors told NBC.