“Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here”: Havana, Black Freedom Struggle, and U.S.–Cuba Relations

Abstract

This article examines the Cuban exile of Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther who was granted formal political asylum by the government of Fidel Castro in 1984. Cuba’s provision of sanctuary to Shakur and other U.S. Black activists offers new insights into the complex relationship between the African American freedom struggle and the Cuban Revolution. This article examines the politics of Shakur’s exile in Havana, her significance within the Black radical imagination, and the influence of her exile upon U.S.–Cuba relations amid the Cold War and the War on Terror. It argues that Shakur’s exile demonstrates the wedding of Washington’s longstanding antipathy toward the Cuban Revolution with its persistent attempts to destroy U.S. Black radical movements. Melded together now within the discourse of “anti-terrorism,” Washington’s hostility toward both Cuba and the legacy of the Black Panther Party suggests the durability of these antagonisms long after the decline of the Black Power and Cold War eras to which they are normally linked.

Keywords::

• African American freedom struggle
• Assata Shakur
• Black Liberation Army
• Black Panther party
• Cold War
• communism
• Cuban revolution
• global civil rights era
• terrorism
• U.S. political prisoners
• U.S.–Cuba relations
• War on Terror

Notes

Media and law enforcement sources used several spellings of Shakur’s birth name, including “Joanne,” and “JoAnne.” Here the spellings have been left as they appear in the original sources.

Robert Hanley, “Miss Chesimard Flees Jersey Prison, Helped By 3 Armed ‘Visitors,’” New York Times, November 3, 1979. The prison break occurred on Black Solidarity Day, founded by activists in 1969 and set to occur on the Monday preceding national elections.

Although an analysis of Shakur’s legal case is beyond the scope of this article, the available evidence strongly points to her innocence. This and Shakur’s other legal cases are detailed in a book by her aunt, attorney Evelyn A. Williams, who acted as co-counsel. See Inadmissible Evidence: The Story of the African-American Trial Lawyer Who Defended the Black Liberation Army (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993).

Rev. Herbert Daughtry, “Run Hard Sister, Run Hard,” New York Amsterdam News, December 1, 1979.

The most iconic of the posters show a black and white photo of a smiling Shakur wearing small hoop earrings; in the corner of the poster are printed the words “Republic of New Africa.” Oakland Museum of California, All of Us or None Archive: http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/2010547354 (accessed February 15, 2018). Although the poster is dated “c. 1975,” before Shakur’s break from prison, the poster was also widely used after her escape.

See, for example, “Ms. Chesimard Breaks Prison,” The Baltimore Afro-American, November 10, 1979.

Jane Rosen, “Black Lib Woman Shot in Battle,” The Guardian, May 4, 1973.

For the early 1960s, see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999). For late 1960s, see Teishan Latner, “Take Me to Havana! Airline Hijacking, U.S.–Cuba Relations, and Political Protest in Late Sixties’ America,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 1 (2015): 16–44.

Paul Brinkley-Rogers, “People on Run Finding Selves at Home Abroad with Castro,” The Miami Herald, March 10, 2001.

Assata Shakur, “An Open Letter from Assata Shakur,” Canadian Dimension 32, no.4 (July 1998), 17, 21.

See Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a history of palenques in Cuba specifically, see Gabino La Rosa Corza, Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

See, for instance, Devyn Spence Benson, “Cuba Calls: African American Tourism, Race, and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961,” Hispanic American Historical Review 93, no. 2 (2013): 239–71; Rosa Guy, “Castro in New York,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 1, Fall (1996): 1; Latner, “Take Me to Havana!”; Ruth Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders in the 1960s (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999); Besenia Rodriguez, “‘De la Esclavitud Yanqui a la Libertad Cubana’: U.S. Black Radicals, the Cuban Revolution, and the Formation of a Tricontinental Ideology,” Radical History Review 92, Spring (2005): 62–87; and Sarah Seidman, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 2 (2012).

“Political asylum” is here used to indicate the granting of sanctuary and protection to persons fearing significant political, racial, or ideological persecution in their home country. Political asylum has been a highly contested idea throughout the history of U.S.–Cuba relations, as Havana and Washington staked competing claims about what constituted “legitimate” repression or persecution, and who was deserving of asylum.

For Cuban internationalism see, for instance, Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Margaret Randall, Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); and Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The global reverberations of the U.S. Civil Rights movements have been examined most thoroughly during the period preceding the 1970s. See, for instance, Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads. African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and Tyson, Radio Free Dixie. The global reach and imagination of the later era of the African American freedom struggle is examined in various forms within a range of scholarship. See Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007); and Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).

See, for instance, Benson, “Cuba Calls”; Guy, “Castro in New York”; Latner, “Take Me to Havana!”; Ruth Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders in the 1960s (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999); Rodriguez, “‘De la Esclavitud Yanqui a la Libertad Cubana”; and Seidman, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity.”

The first sustained examination of African American political exile in Cuba occurs in the author’s book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Joy James, “Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 141.

One notable exception is James, “Framing the Panther.” Short discussions of Shakur are included in a number of works. See, for instance, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, “Looking Black at Revolutionary Cuba,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 1 (2009): 53–62; and Cheryl Greenberg, “Of Black Revolutionaries and Whig Histories: Using Assata in the Classroom,” Journal of American Ethnic History 32, no. 1 (2012), 90–94.

Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 61.

Classic studies include Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868–98 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Two recent studies include Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Danielle Pilar Clealand, The Power of Race in Cuba: Racial Ideology and Black Consciousness During the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). See also Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988).

See Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 1999.

Fidel Castro, speech, Chaplin Theater, Havana, October 4, 1965.

Ibid.

United Nations, Article 14, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly December 1948.

UN General Assembly, Declaration on Territorial Asylum, December 14, 1967, A/RES/2312(XXII), http://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f05a2c.html (accessed August 6, 2013).

Latner, “Take Me to Havana!”

For the pre-1959 period, see Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, eds., Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

Clytus, Black Man in Red Cuba, 24.

Brent, Long Time Gone, 131.

Yolanda Gómez, “Human Rights in U.S. Prisons?,” Granma, English edition, March 13, 1977.

Yolanda Gómez, “The Rights of Blacks in the United States,” Granma, English edition, May 1, 1977.

Lennox Hinds, a member of Assata Shakur’s legal defense team during her 1977 trial, served as National Director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers at the time of the filing. Focusing on the violations of the rights of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans, the petition cited the cases of U.S. political prisoners, including well-known cases such as the Wilmington Ten civil rights activists, Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement, Assata Shakur, and five Puerto Rican independistas, whose release Fidel Castro had advocated for personally. See Simon Anekwe, “Carter Challenged by Petition,” New York Amsterdam News, December 23, 1978.

Oscar Ferrer, “Political Prisoners in the United States,” Granma, English edition, December 31, 1978.

Assata Shakur, interview, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! newspaper, published June/July 1996, http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org/index.php/fight-racism/2413-assata-shakur (accessed August 25, 2013).

The child’s father was one of Shakur’s co-defendants, Kamau Sadiki.

Assata Shakur, interview, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!; Assata Shakur, interviewed by Paul Davidson, November 6, 2000, Havana, http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/assata_interview.htm.

Shakur, interviewed by Paul Davidson.

After the Newsday story broke, the NJ FBI office and NJ State Police released a joint statement maintaining that “recent public statements” about Shakur’s presence in Cuba had “confirmed previously known task force information.” Nick Ravo, “Officials Can’t Confirm Chesimard Is in Havana,” The New York Times, October 13, 1987.

Although Lawrence Hills Books published Assata in the U.S. and Canada, the book’s copyright was held by Zed Books in the United Kingdom in order to circumvent U.S. “Son of Sam” laws preventing persons convicted of crimes from monetarily profiting from published works. Shakur’s aunt and longtime attorney Evelyn A. Williams, who visited Cuba several times, acted as Shakur’s intermediary. See Ravo, “Officials Can’t Confirm Chesimard Is in Havana.”

See also an interview with Shakur in Margot Pepper, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana (San Francisco: Freedom Voices, 2005).

Howell, “On the Run With Assata Shakur.” Shakur would eventually earn a master’s degree in social sciences.

Lawrence Hill, president of Lawrence Hill Books, quoted in John T. McQuiston, “Fugitive Murderer Reported in Cuba,” The New York Times, October 12, 1987. The book’s official release date was January 15, 1988.

Shakur’s writings and interviews, produced before she arrived in Cuba, were widely disseminated before the publication of Assata. The best known was a 1973 letter, entitled “To My People,” written from prison and published in The Black Scholar 5, no. 2 (1973), 16–18.

Shakur, Assata, 268. Lower case text is true to original.

Author’s interview with Nehanda Abiodun, September 15, 2012, Havana.

For instance, Manning Marable, in Cuba as part of an academic delegation made up of members from Columbia University’s African American Studies program in 1997, recounted his meeting with Shakur for the Los Angeles Sentinel. Marable, “The Color Line: Black Political Prisoners: The Case of Assata Shakur,” May 7, 1998, p. A7. An interview with her, entitled “Assata Shakur: The Continuity of Struggle,” was published by Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 2 (1999): 93–100.

See, for example, Margo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000); and Tracye E. Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Role in the Revolution Is’: Gender Politics and Leadership in the Black Panther Party, 1966–71,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Nisa Islam Muhammad, “Assata Shakur: From Exile with Love,” The Final Call, June 11, 2002.

Assata Shakur was a close friend of Afeni Shakur while the two were members of the BPP. In characteristic Panther internationalism, Tupac Amaru Shakur is named for the Peruvian indigenous leader who led an uprising against the Spanish in 1780.

For instance, a search of the hip hop Internet database www.rapgenius.com in 2013 reveals 37 songs with lyrics containing a reference to Assata Shakur by name; 38 to Harriet Tubman, 22 to Angela Davis, 8 to Ida B. Wells, and 22 to Sojourner Truth.

Cheryll Y. Greene, “Word from a Sister in Exile,” Essence, February 1988, p. 60.

Quoted by Examiner.com, “Can Obama bring back Chesimard alive?,” April 18, 2009, http://www.examiner.com/article/can-obama-bring-back-chesimard-alive (accessed September 2, 2013).

See Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; and Seidman, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity.”

Assata Shakur, interviewed by Paul Davidson, November 6, 2000, Havana, http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/assata_interview.htm (accessed February 15, 2018).

See Alejandro de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981.” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 1 (1995): 131–68.

Shakur, interviewed by Paul Davidson, November 6, 2000.

P.L. 104-114, Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996, One Hundred Fourth Congress, March 12, 1996.

P.L. 104-114, Section 113.

H. Con. Res. 244, 105 Congress, 2nd Session, proposed, March 17, 1998.

Michelle Crouch, “Cuba Denies N.J. Request for Fugitive Joanne Chesimard Fled While Serving Time For Murder,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1998.

H. Con. Res. 254, 105 Congress, 2nd Session, March 30, 1998.

Michael Ratner, “Immoral Bounty for Assata,” Covert Action Quarterly no. 65 (1998).

Maxine Waters, Letter to Fidel Castro, September 29, 1998. http://www.afrocubaweb.com/assata5.htm#Water’s%20letter (accessed October 18, 2013).

See, for instance, Anthony Lappé, “Fugitive from Time,” New York Times, May 23, 1999.

H. R. 2292, “No Safe haven in Cuba Act,” U.S. House of Representatives, June 21, 2001.

The State Department’s 2002 and 2003 Patterns of Global Terrorism reports acknowledged that Colombia had publically agreed to Cuba’s mediation with the ELN.

U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism 2004, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, April 2005, 88. Emphasis mine.

On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a military grade C-4 explosive device on the neighborhood headquarters of the MOVE organization after the group, which had refused to cooperate with an eviction notice and armed itself against police assault. Eleven of the group’s members, including five children, were killed in the resulting fire, which was allowed to burn until it had destroyed fifty other homes in the predominantly African American neighborhood in West Philadelphia. City officials labeled the group a terrorist cult, while critics of the police action likened the incident to an act of state terrorism. See Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Mark P. Sullivan, “Cuba and the State Sponsors of Terrorism List,” CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, May 13, 2005, 9.

FBI, wanted poster, “Joanne Deborah Chesimard,” color, c. 2005.

Charlie Hill, interview by author, September 9, 2012, Havana, Cuba.

This is according to sources in Cuba who have been personal friends and worked extensively with Shakur. The author spoke with these individuals in Havana in September 2012 and June 2013, but they wish to remain nameless for the security of Shakur.

John Rice, “Castro Defends Fugitive Sought by U.S.,” Associated Press, May 11, 2005.

Kathleen Cleaver, “Why Has the FBI Placed a Million-Dollar Bounty on Assata Shakur?,” The Independent, July 20, 2005.

Mos Def, “Assata Shakur: The Government’s Terrorist Is Our Community’s Heroine,” www.allhiphop.com, May 18, 2005, https://allhiphop.com/2005/05/17/assata-shakur-the-governments-terrorist-is-our-communitys-heroine/ (accessed November 19, 2015).

Karen W. Arenson, “CUNY Chief Orders Names Stripped from Student Center,” The New York Times, December 13, 2006.

Assembly Resolution No. 232, State of New Jersey, 212th Legislature, Introduced January 4, 2007.

Marc Lacey, “U.S. Fugitives Worry about a Cuba Without Castro,” New York Times, May 12, 2007.

See, for instance, DeWayne Wickham, “Fugitives have Good Reason to Fear Closer Ties to Cuba,” Miami Times, October 21, 2009, p. 2A.

Sean T. Kean, Letter to Barack Obama, April 17, 2009, http://blog.nj.com/ledgerupdates_impact/2009/04/LettertoPresObamaSenatorKean.pdf (accessed August 22, 2013).

Sara Just, “Common Controversy Comes to White House Poetry Night; Cops, Conservatives Cry Foul at Some of His Past Work,” ABCNews.com, May 11, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/05/common-controversy-comes-to-white-house-poetry-night-cops-conservatives-cry-foul-at-some-of-his-past-work/ (accessed August 23, 2013).

Rep. Scott Garrett, letter to Barack Obama, May 13, 2011.

FBI, “New Most Wanted Terrorist: Joanne Chesimard First Woman Added to List,” FBI website, May 2, 2013, http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2013/may/joanne-chesimard-first-woman-named-most-wanted-terrorists-list (accessed August 20, 2013).

FBI, Newark Office, press release, “Joanne Chesimard, Convicted Murderer and Fugitive, Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorists List, with $1 Million FBI Reward Offered for Information Leading to Her Capture and Return,” May 2, 2013, http://www.fbi.gov/newark/press-releases/2013/joanne-chesimard-convicted-murderer-and-fugitive-named-to-fbi-most-wanted-terrorists-list-with-1-million-fbi-reward-offered-for-information-leading-to-her-capture-and-return (accessed September 3, 2013).

Tomás Fernández Robaína, interview with author, Havana, June 28, 2013.

Michael Isikoff, “Castro Government: We Will Never Return Fugitive Cop Killer to U.S.,” Yahoo News, March 2, 2015, https://www.yahoo.com/news/castro-government--we-will-never-return-fugitive-cop-killer-to-u-s-203643115.html (accessed January 12, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teishan A. Latner

Teishan A. Latner is Assistant Professor of history at Thomas Jefferson University. His book, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992, has been published by the University of North Carolina Press for the “Justice, Power, and Politics” book series. Prior to coming to Thomas Jefferson University, Latner was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War, and a Research Associate at the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara.