All 40 Cubans and 28 foreigners aboard died, authorities announced early Friday.

AeroCaribbean Flight 883 was en route from the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to the capital when it reported an emergency at 5:42 p.m. local time Thursday, then lost contact with air traffic controllers. It went down near Guasimal, a village in Sancti Spiritus province, carrying 61 passengers and a crew of seven.

Cuba's Civil Aviation Authority issued a statement hours later saying there were no survivors. It released a list of passengers that included nine Argentines, seven Mexicans, three Dutch citizens, two Germans, two Austrians, a French citizen, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Venezuelan and a Japanese. The seven member crew were all Cuban.

Emergency vehicles lined a road about 3 km from the crash site, and journalists were not permitted to get any closer to the wreckage in a remote and rugged area.

The twice-a-week AeroCaribbean flight goes from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Santiago de Cuba to Havana. State media said that the plane was an ATR-72 twin turboprop and that the crash site was not far from the Zaza reservoir, the largest in Cuba. It said authorities had mobilized doctors and emergency workers in the rural area, which is about 350 km east of Havana.