State television said the flight had been headed to Holguín, on the eastern part of the island. The plane, a Boeing 737 leased by Cubana de Aviación, a state-run Cuban airline, first went into service in 1979, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, making it one of the older 737s still in commercial operation.

The plane crashed at 12:08 p.m. just after it had departed Jose Martí International Airport, Cuba’s state newspaper, Granma, reported on its website. It said the flight, DMJ 0972, carried 105 people, including at least five children. The plane also carried nine crew members, the United Nations said. Five of them were Mexican, according to Mexican officials.

Cuban state media initially said that all of the people aboard were foreigners but later reversed itself, saying most of the passengers were Cubans. Two of the victims were Argentines, Argentina’s Foreign Ministry said Friday night. The only survivors were three women, according to Granma; the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde initially said one them had died, though it later corrected that report.

Residents of a neighborhood near the airport said that after the plane took off, it suddenly veered in an unusual direction.

Rocio Yoselis Martínez González, 21, a manicurist, was hanging laundry on a clothesline in her front yard when the plane made its odd turn. More worrisome, she said, it was low and descending, barely clearing the wooden telephone poles on her street.

As it roared overhead, Ms. Martínez saw that one of the engines was on fire. The plane then disappeared behind trees and crashed on the edge of a field, hundreds of yards from her house. The tremor from the impact and explosion was so strong that it shook the ground and knocked decorative objects off her shelves, she said.

“I was in shock,” she recalled. “They show things like this in a movie, but in the end it’s a movie.”

Cuba’s new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, traveled to the site of the crash to oversee recovery efforts along with Health Minister Roberto Morales, while buses carrying relatives of the flight’s passengers headed to Havana to identify the victims.