Per Airline Route (who better not retract this news after they posted it) :) American Airlines is finally pulling out of its long beleaguered Caribbean-focused hub in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Beginning April 1, AA will cancel the following routes:

San Juan – Antigua 1 daily
San Juan – Beef Island 4 daily
San Juan – Dominica 1 daily
San Juan – Fort-de-France 1 daily
San Juan – Punta Cana 2 daily
San Juan – Santiago (Dominican Republic) 1 daily
San Juan – Santo Domingo 2 daily
San Juan – St. Croix 2 daily
San Juan – St. Kitts 1 daily
San Juan – St. Thomas 2 daily

This leaves Caracas as the sole international route out of San Juan.

This has been a pretty long, slow death that everyone has seen coming (to the point where JetBlue has basically walked in the front door and built out a small focus city in San Juan with no response from AA, which tells you something, as does the fact that Spirit hasn’t marched down to SJU). Still, just as when Delta finally – and mercifully – pulls the plug on Memphis, it’s still a bit of a shock to the system to see AA giving up the hub it built about 25 years ago. That said, as someone who owns a few shares of US Airways, I’m glad to see they’re cleaning up the operation before the merger.