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

On November 3, 1979, headlines announced the prison break of JoAnne Chesimard,[1] a former Black Panther and a member of the organization’s clandestine offshoot, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). As The New York Times reported it: “three black men who had come to visit Miss Chesimard, drew .45-caliber automatic pistols, seized two guards as hostages and commandeered a prison van. … The three men and the 32-year-old Miss Chesimard, who was serving a life term plus 65 years for murder and assault, were joined by a fifth confederate, tentatively described by authorities as a white woman. They fled in two cars … the guards were released unharmed.”[2]

Convicted in 1977 by an all white jury of murdering a New Jersey State trooper, although no physical evidence indicated that she had been the shooter,[3] Chesimard’s trial had been widely covered in the African American press as a symbol of police and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts to suppress Black radical movements. One of New York’s oldest Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News, referring to Chesimard by the Yoruba and Muslim names that she had taken years earlier, did not conceal its jubilation at the news of the jail break. “[T]hey say three brave brothers and a sister went to fetch Assata Shakur from the cold confines of steel and stone where she had been held fast against her will. Who the four were, I know not. But, every Black person knows them and have met them in the collective unconscious mind of the race.”[4] Ascending to the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list amid a massive search, Shakur assumed the status of a folk hero. Supporters in New York and Los Angeles, likening her to an escaped slave, posted their own notices in the windows of their homes: “Assata Shakur is welcome here.”[5] But the woman dubbed the “soul of the Black Liberation Army”[6] by law enforcement officials and a “fanatical black Joan of Arc”[7] in lurid tabloid reports, had vanished. Five years passed. And then, in an October 1987 report from Cuba, Newsday revealed that Shakur was living in Havana, where she had been granted political asylum by the government of Fidel Castro.

Shakur’s sanctuary in Cuba recalled earlier episodes in which African American activists on the lam had found asylum there. Several dozen had taken refuge on the island since the early 1960s, a number that included members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Black Panther Party (BPP), and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). The presence of U.S. asylees on the island had rankled U.S. authorities, drawing media attention to the ties between Cuba’s communist government and the U.S. radical left and triggering calls for tougher sanctions against Havana.[8] Coming amid the renewed Cold War acrimony of the Reagan era, however, Shakur’s sanctuary would be different. For her supporters, Shakur’s presence on the island symbolized the convergence of state repression against U.S. Black radical movements, on the one hand, and Washington’s indefatigable efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution on the other. For U.S. officialdom, Shakur’s sanctuary signaled Cuba’s continuing ability to flout U.S. power in the hemisphere.

Yet Cuba’s willingness to defy Washington through the provision of asylum to U.S. dissidents outlasted the Cold War. By the mid 1990s, as Cuba sank deeper into the malaise of economic collapse following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington redoubled its efforts. Although Washington and Havana maintained no active extradition treaty, the United States now added the return of Shakur to its list of formal conditions for the normalization of diplomatic relations with Havana, wedding the fate of Shakur and other U.S. political asylees on the island to U.S.–Cuba relations. When New Jersey’s governor announced a $100,000 reward for Shakur’s apprehension in 1998, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, citing Cuba’s right as a sovereign nation to extend political sanctuary to foreigners, countered that Shakur was not a criminal but a “well-known civil rights activist'’ who had fled from state repression.[9] As the FBI continued efforts to apprehend her, Shakur defiantly characterized herself as a “a 20th century escaped slave,” and described Cuba, which had provided haven to thousands of war refugees and leftwing dissidents from across the Third World, as “one of the largest, most resistant and most courageous palenques that has ever existed on the face of this planet.”[10]

Shakur’s likening of post-1959 Cuba to a palenque,[11] the clandestine communities of escaped enslaved Africans and indigenous people that existed in the Caribbean during the era of slavery, provides an entry point through which to evaluate the complex politics of solidarity between revolutionary Cuba and the African American freedom struggle, a relationship that has increasingly been the focus of scholarship.[12] Shakur’s political asylum[13] on the island embodies the nexus between Cuba’s project of revolutionary internationalism, which forged strategic ties between Havana and leftwing allies across the Third World, and the global dimensions of U.S. Black radicalism, which has sought to connect the freedom dreams of the Black radical imagination to the wider African diaspora and to liberatory traditions worldwide.[14] These linkages are illuminated in vivid terms within Shakur’s own public statements and writings from exile. In characterizing Cuba as a “palenque,” Shakur simultaneously signaled the island’s extant status as a haven for oppressed people from across the decolonizing world, a political geography that included, in Marxist fashion, “internally colonized” African Americans and others whose political location inside the territory of the Colossus had been forged by the historical and geopolitical forces of slavery and imperialism.

Cuba’s provision of sanctuary to Shakur thus offers new insights into Cuba’s relationship with the African American freedom struggle, and the way in which the island has figured in the U.S. Black radical imaginary as both a material site of sanctuary from U.S.-style white supremacy and anti-left political repression and as a more abstract terrain of radical hope and liberatory possibility. At the apex of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Cuban government provided formal political asylum to a small but high-profile group of U.S. Black activists, and in doing so helped make the African American freedom struggle an integral part of its engagement with both the broader multi-ethnic U.S. Left and, at times, its diplomatic relations with Washington. Political sanctuary, this article contends, became an avenue through which the Cuban government extended tangible aid to the bourgeoning African American freedom movement to its north while simultaneously advancing its project of anti-imperialism vis-à-vis Washington amid the geopolitics of the Cold War. In doing so, Havana achieved both idealistic and pragmatic ends, strengthening its standing as a global ally of the U.S. Black freedom struggle while exploiting the persistence of white supremacy and anti-left state repression in the United States to deploy scathing critiques of Washington’s claims to moral superiority in the arena of human rights. Positioning itself as a vanguard of Third World self-determination in the shadow of a proximate hostile superpower, Cuba’s provision of asylum for Shakur became intertwined with Havana’s Cold War national security aims, which sought allies abroad and the undermining of Washington’s capacity to isolate Cuba diplomatically and assault it militarily.

As a growing body of scholarship has shown, the relationship between post-revolutionary Cuba and the African American freedom struggle remains a significant facet of the global civil rights era.[15] The first period of this engagement has received the most study. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, Cuba’s 1959 revolution became a source of radical hope for African American activists, writers, and artists seeking global refuges from Jim Crow. Most famously, figures such as Amiri Baraka and Harold Cruse visited Cuba to evaluate the revolution’s egalitarian claims up-close, while Robert F. Williams, an NAACP member and advocate of Black self-defense, was granted formal political asylum there. These early encounters between post-1959 Cuba and the U.S. Black freedom struggle, however, foreshadowed a larger series of engagements in the late 1960s and beyond. Although its consequences for both U.S.–Cuba relations and for Cuba’s place within the U.S. Black radical imagination would prove far more expansive, this later convergence has received less study. In the political upheaval and radical incandescence of the late sixties era, Cuba became a model of successful revolutionary struggle and Third World self-determination for activists within the broadly conceived Black Power movement. Stokely Carmichael, known for his role within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, toured the island in 1967, engaging in public displays of solidarity with Fidel Castro. The BPP sent an official delegation to the island in 1968, and Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton later obtained formal political asylum there. Almost a dozen members or affiliates of the BPP and the RNA hijacked airplanes to reach the island beginning in 1968, with several becoming long-term residents of Havana. Angela Davis toured the island following her release from prison in 1972 to recognize the Cuban government’s role in the global campaign for her freedom. But while Shakur’s political asylum in Cuba, spanning over three decades, has proven the most impactful of all of these episodes, it has received little study until now.[16] This article seeks to situate Shakur’s Cuban exile, together with its political and diplomatic reverberations, within the broader context of Cuba’s relationship with U.S. social justice movements.

Finally, Cuba’s provision of asylum to Shakur and other U.S. Black radicals adds a missing component to scholarship on U.S.–Cuba diplomacy after the formal Cold War. As scholar Joy James notes, “Assata Shakur became a fugitive in the only communist country in the hemisphere. Cuba thus shares an ‘outlaw’ status with the black female fugitive it harbors.”[17] Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, however, the specter of Shakur and other U.S. asylees in Cuba helped fill the discursive void left by the decline of the Cold War, allowing Washington to update its 1982 designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” by highlighting the Cuban government’s sheltering of Americans accused of terrorism, air hijacking, and murder— a group that U.S. officialdom consistently represented to lawmakers and the U.S. public through the case of Shakur. Amid the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of a War on Terror in late 2001, the United States again deployed the discourse of anti-terrorism to marginalize Cuba within the world political system, a maneuver that now depended in part upon the demonization of a key figure of the modern Black radical tradition. With the FBI’s May 2013 addition of Shakur to its “most wanted terrorists” list and the increase of the reward for her apprehension to an extraordinary $2 million, the “bounty” for Shakur became among the highest of any fugitive in the world. Shakur’s status as a protected guest of the Castro government thus provided Washington with one of its last remaining pretexts for its insistence that the aging communist government posed a threat to American interests. The circumstances of Shakur’s asylum, this article argues, demonstrates the wedding of Washington’s longstanding antipathy toward the Cuban Revolution with its hostility to U.S. Black radical movements. Melded together now within discourses 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.

Curiously, despite her visibility as a historical figure, one who has become both iconic as a symbol of Black resistance and notorious as the target of the FBI, Shakur has received far less scholarly attention than might be expected.[18] This is especially significant given the power of her iconography within the multi-ethnic U.S. Left, where she has been variously embraced as a folk hero of the receding Black Power era, a symbol of revolutionary Black feminist agency, and a living embodiment of successful resistance to anti-Black state repression, one who is recognizable even within mainstream popular culture, first as the aunt of slain hip hop legend Tupac Shakur and now as a canonized historical figure to the modern Black Lives Matter movement. As scholar Dylan Rodríguez contends, Shakur has represented “a venerated (if sometimes fetishized) signification of liberatory desire and possibility for many U.S. radicals and revolutionaries.”[19]

Indeed, the admiration accorded Shakur has at times risked oversimplifying the broader relationship between revolutionary Cuba and the African American freedom struggle, whose encounter has historically generated disillusionment as well as solidarity. Although the Cuban government and much of the populace, including many Afro-Cubans, consistently maintained that notable reductions in racial disparities enabled by the 1959 revolution had effectively eradicated institutional racism, not all U.S. visitors to Cuba were convinced. Indeed, while Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton remained longtime supporters of the Cuban government, for instance, Robert F. Williams, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver publicly questioned Fidel Castro’s commitment to antiracism. A large body of work has documented the durability of Cuba’s longstanding “raceless” national imaginary, one in which Cubans of all colors have embraced the vision of a multi-racial nation unified in defense of national self-determination.[20] But so too has much scholarship documented the persistence of racism in Cuba after 1959, as well as the Cuban government’s denial of racism’s salience after 1959 and its rebuke of Afro-Cubans who have raised the issue in the public sphere.[21] Shakur’s statements and interviews, as well as her longtime collaboration with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, the inner circle of Cuban government, as an adviser on issues of race and the African diaspora beginning in the 1980s confirm that she has remained committed to Cuba’s revolution. Nonetheless, as a guest of the Cuban government, Shakur’s full views on Cuba’s complex racial climate may never be known. This article uses available sources to analyze Shakur’s political asylum on the island, situating it within the larger history of the post-1959 engagement between Cuba and the African American freedom struggle and examining the ways in which Cuba has continued to figure into the Black radical imagination as a site of both possibility and unfulfilled promise long after the apex of the civil rights/Black power era.

Havana and the Politics of Asylum

The Cuban government’s willingness to grant political asylum to Black radicals first burst into headlines in 1961, when the Castro government granted sanctuary to Mabel and Robert F. Williams. Leaders of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, who had formed a Black gun club to help local residents defend themselves against terroristic violence from the Ku Klux Klan and white vigilantes, the Williams’ soon found themselves sought by the FBI on trumped up kidnapping charges.[22] Making their way surreptitiously to Cuba, they received a heroes’ welcome from Fidel Castro and were accorded a status akin to that of foreign diplomats. Speaking at Havana’s Chaplin Theater in October 1965, Castro juxtaposed Cuba’s status as a haven for global leftwing political refugees with the continuing emigration of Cubans to the United States seeking sanctuary from the upheaval wrought by the revolution against the U.S.-supported government of Fulgencio Batista. “Although it is true that certain citizens educated in those ideas of the past and in that system of life of the past prefer to go to the United States,” Castro argued, “it is also true that this country has become the sanctuary of the revolutionaries of this continent.”[23] By invoking Cuba’s newfound status as a global haven for persecuted leftists, Castro sought to both mitigate the Cuban émigrés’ charges of political repression in Cuba under the new socialist regime, and to position Cuba as an ally of anti-imperialist movements worldwide. Claiming that the Williams had been “pursued by bloody and imperialist oligarchies,” Castro argued that their political sanctuary in Cuba was justified by imminent need:

The revolutionaries of the continent have a right to consider themselves our brothers, and they are worthy of this right. This includes North American revolutionaries, because some leaders, like Robert Williams, fiercely persecuted there, found asylum in this land. Thus, just as he, so can those being persecuted by reactionaries and exploiters find asylum here. It does not matter if they speak English and born in the United States. This is the fatherland of the revolutionaries of this continent.[24]

The legal framework for Cuba’s provision of political asylum to foreigners was based, like all sovereign nations, in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) in 1948, the article asserted the right of all people of the world “to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” albeit with a condition: “This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”[25] Thus arose both the modern legal basis for Cuba’s ability to grant asylum to foreign dissidents, and the right of their home countries to dispute the veracity of dissidents’ claims to political persecution. The basis for Cuba’s provision of asylum to U.S. citizens was further bolstered in December 1967, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Territorial Asylum. Affirming that asylum granted by a nation, “in the exercise of its sovereignty,” including to “persons struggling against colonialism, shall be respected by all other States,” the language of the Declaration reinforced the sovereign right of nations to determine their own criteria for defining what, exactly, constituted legitimate political repression, asserting: “It shall rest with the State granting asylum to evaluate the grounds for the grant of asylum.”[26]

Both the United States and Cuba would henceforth deploy this language to defend their provision of asylum. Cuba claimed that American asylees were refugees from capitalist inequality and racial persecution, and the United States claimed that its Cuban asylees were refugees from communism and political repression. In 1968, when Cuba suddenly became a destination for a stream of North American air hijackers seeking political sanctuary and haven from criminal charges, Cuba provided temporary de facto or long-term formal asylum to approximately ninety American citizens or residents arriving clandestinely by airplane, refusing to return them to the United States to face charges.[27] Cuba also provided political asylum to several Black Panther activists, most notably Eldridge Cleaver in 1968 and Huey Newton in 1975. African American radicals, comprising the majority of Americans who were granted long-term political asylum in Cuba after 1959, perceived Cuba as a haven largely due to the ties of transnational solidarity that civil rights activists and Black intellectuals had forged with the island’s revolutionary government during the early months and years of the Cuban Revolution, as well as older contact between African Americans and Cuba.[28]

U.S. Black radicals with some familiarity with the Cuban press were not unjustified in assuming that Cuban officials, and indeed the Cuban public itself, might be sympathetic to their claims of political persecution. Cuban press coverage of North America had painted a uniformly bleak portrait of life in El Imperio, particularly for African Americans and other people of color, for poor people, and for political dissidents. The Cuban media had devoted significant coverage to the Black civil rights movement, lambasting U.S. racial segregation and the televised brutality meted out to non-violent demonstrators as proof of the poverty of America’s claims to moral authority in the arena of political freedom. John Clytus, a Black man from California who had come to Cuba in 1964 in search of a haven from racism but eventually grew disillusioned with communism, later described the tone of the Cuban press coverage. “Newspaper headlines screamed about the racial unrest in the States,” he wrote, with African Americans “portrayed as being at the mercy of the Ku Klux Klan, the police, and police dogs.”[29]

Lurid depictions of U.S. racism in the Cuban press had been supplemented, however, by significant attention to the Civil Rights Movement. By the late 1960s, Cuban media coverage also focused upon the emergence of Black Power, coverage that garnered notice in radical circles stateside. William Lee Brent, a former Black Panther seeking to flee to Cuba in 1969 to avoid criminal charges stemming from a shootout with San Francisco police, cited the Cuban media’s positive press coverage of the BPP as one of the factors leading him to believe that he might be welcomed there as a political asylee. “Shortly after I joined the Panthers I’d heard that revolutionaries who needed political asylum could get it in Cuba with no problem,” Brent later wrote. “I considered myself a revolutionary and I certainly needed asylum.”[30] But as pressure mounted from Washington and international human rights organizations during the mid 1970s over allegations of political prisoners in Cuba’s own jails, the island’s state media sought to deflect these accusations by running coverage that highlighted the links between incarceration and political repression in the United States. One Granma article in March 1977, entitled “Human Rights in U.S. Prisons?” cited a recent report by the American Medical Association documenting widespread medical neglect in the American prison system, including the finding that 15% of prisoners surveyed in thirty prisons suffered from a form of tuberculosis. The article went on to condemn incidents of medical testing conducted on U.S. prisoners, including the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted on African American prisoners, a story that had broken in the U.S. media in 1972.[31] “Discrimination and racism continue to be basic elements of U.S. society,” contended a May 1977 Granma article that contained a profile of Ella Mae Ellison, a young Black woman and a mother of four who, falsely accused of bank robbery and murder, who had been sentenced to life in prison.[32]

Framing the U.S. government as a violator of its own peoples’ civil rights, the Cuban media attempted to dispute the narratives of the Ford and Carter administrations, which asserted that U.S.-style democracy was a bulwark in defense of global civil freedoms. When the U.S.-based National Conference of Black Lawyers and two other civil rights organizations submitted a petition to the UN Commission on Human Rights in December 1978 calling attention to widespread violations of the rights of people of color in the United States, including the presence of a number of jailed activists that the report identified as political prisoners,[33] Granma seized upon the story, publishing an article lambasting what it called the “imperialist fabrication” of U.S. claims to be a global beacon of political freedom. Including a photo of Assata Shakur, who Granma identified as a “poetess and historian … a courageous activist in the Black civil rights movement” and a “political prisoner,” the article’s cataloging of violations of political freedom in the United States was typical of Granma’s coverage during the 1970s. Political repression in the United States, Granma charged,

takes the form of street arrests of demonstrators; intimidation of trade union and student organizations; the keeping of police files on hundreds of thousands of people who oppose the imperialist political system. … Among these thousands of political prisoners, isolated and hidden away by the authorities, are Indians imprisoned after the protest at Wounded Knee in 1970; black citizens imprisoned for their civil rights activities; and Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. It is often sufficient that social activists rank among the dispossessed for them to find themselves political prisoners, labeled by a web of falsehoods as “common criminals.”[34]

The Cuban state media’s focus upon U.S. political repression during the late 1970s, as the United States pressured Cuba to release political dissidents from its own prisons, allowed Cuba to dispute the exceptionalism and selective attention of Washington’s narrative of human rights, which condemned political repression in Cuba and other “unfriendly” nations, but did little to protest violations in allied nations, and denied the existence of political repression in the United States altogether. Featured in Granma, the central organ of the Central Committee of Cuba’s Communist Party and the island’s most ubiquitous newspaper, Cuban media coverage in the late 1970s also contained another subtext. It indicated that the Cuban government remained sympathetic to leftwing movements in the United States, and that Havana recognized official repression as an important obstacle confronting dissidents there. Moreover, the article’s contention that the term “common criminals” had been falsely attached to legitimate political dissidents in the United States must be read in light of the Cuban government’s granting asylum to Americans accused of criminal acts, including armed actions such as bank robberies and bombings, that U.S. authorities maintained had no political merit. Havana’s willingness to dispute Washington’s efforts to define the parameters of legitimate political struggle for African Americans lies at the very heart of Cuba’s provision of asylum to Assata Shakur.

Shakur in the Socialist Palenque

More than any other U.S. political asylee in Cuba, Shakur grew to symbolize Cuba’s provision of sanctuary to American dissidents, embodying both the U.S. government’s campaign to retrieve fugitives from the island and the Castro government’s commitment to sanctuary for African American radicals even in the face of strong diplomatic pressure. Arriving in Cuba during the summer of 1984, Shakur was immediately granted the status of a political refugee by the Cuban government.[35] She was provided with an apartment in Havana and a living stipend, and was reunited with her daughter, Kakuya, who had been both conceived and born in prison in 1973.[36]

Upon escaping from prison in 1979, Shakur had immediately regarded Cuba as an obvious destination for asylum. An admirer of the Cuban Revolution, Shakur also favored the geographic proximity of the island to the U.S. mainland which, despite Washington’s travel ban, would allow her family to visit her surreptitiously.[37] Most importantly, Shakur noted, the Caribbean nation had “a long history of supporting victims of political repression … not only of people in the United States, like Huey Newton, Robert Williams, Eldridge Cleaver … but also people who were victims of political repression in other places, like Chile, the apartheid government of South Africa, Namibia. I felt this was a place that held the principle of international[ism] very close to heart.”[38] For a time, Shakur lived quietly, undiscovered by the U.S. media. Despite several quiet visits to Cuba by members of Shakur’s family, the FBI did not publically reveal knowledge of her presence there.[39] The Cuban media likewise made no mention of her.

Shakur’s low profile on the island would be short lived. In the fall of 1987, as Lawrence Hill Books[40] prepared to release her memoirs as Assata: An Autobiography, Shakur’s presence in Cuba was exposed. On October 11, Newsday reporter Ron Howell published the first interview with Shakur since her arrival on the island, confirming her presence and providing the first public glimpse into her life in Cuba. Shakur, Howell reported, was receiving her living expenses, including rent, from the Cuban government, which had assigned her a government responsable to assist her with her transition, as well as family counseling for Shakur and her daughter to help them adjust to life in Cuba.[41] Although most foreign asylees studied at the University of Havana, the article reported the unusual claim that Shakur was studying politics, sociology and philosophy at the Escuela Superior del Partido, a system of colleges run directly by the Cuban Communist Party and populated by its members, with whom she would soon collaborate with as a political advisee.[42] “She is clearly trusted by the Cubans,” wrote Howell, an observation that would prove prescient of the coming years as Shakur worked closely with the central committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and as an intermediary between the government and visiting American delegations. Released in December 1987, Assata, originally subtitled The Autobiography of a Revolutionary,[43] traced Shakur’s life from childhood in North Carolina to adulthood in New York City, lingering upon her activist years and her subsequent trials as a member of the BLA. However, the narrative ends shortly after Shakur’s arrival in Cuba, omitting most of her Cuban experience.[44]

Like other American political asylees, Shakur’s early impressions of Cuba were powerfully influenced by her perceptions of the nation’s ethos of revolutionary internationalism. Arriving in Cuba during the nation’s military involvement in Angola and its support for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Cuba’s highly publicized involvement in post-colonial Africa, beginning in the early 1960s but accelerating in the mid 1970s, was a significant source of her admiration for the nation’s internationalism. This involvement, in turn, created new streams of political asylees arriving in Cuba during the 1980s. Shakur’s interviews and writings during the early years of her asylum repeatedly reveal that she was deeply affected by her encounters with other political asylees and war refugees who had come for sanctuary or medical treatment, often from countries directly affected by U.S. power:

I’m being introduced at a party. The hostess tells me that the man is from El Salvador. I hold out my hand to shake his. A few seconds too late, i realize he is missing an arm. I’m so upset and ashamed i’m almost shaking. … In Cuba i could see the results of u.s. foreign policy: torture victims on crutches who came from other countries to Cuba for treatment, including Namibian children who had survived massacres, and evidence of the vicious aggression the u.s. government had committed against Cuba.”[45]

By the mid-1990s, Shakur had become a regular face at cultural and political events in Havana. Now fluent in Spanish and highly respected by Cuban officials, Shakur worked closely with the Central Committee of Cuba’s communist party, advising the government on issues related to U.S. African Americans and the African diaspora, and assuming the role of an intermediary between the Cuban government and members of visiting American leftwing movements generally and the U.S. Black liberation struggle specifically. As Nehanda Abiodun, a member of the BLA who obtained political asylum in Cuba in 1990 later observed, “that’s Assata’s unique contribution—working with the Cuban leadership to help them understand our struggle.”[46] Working as an English language editor for Radio Havana Cuba and becoming a familiar face at public events sponsored by Cuban organizations such as the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos and Casa de las Americas, Shakur interacted with hundreds of visiting Americans, ranging from members of the Venceremos Brigade to academic delegations.[47]

Shakur’s political exile in Cuba intensified, rather than diminished, her visibility as an icon of the contemporary Black radical imagination. By the mid 1990s, Shakur’s autobiography had begun appearing on the syllabi of college courses in the United States alongside classic works of autobiography in the African American literary tradition. Like Elaine Brown’s 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power, Shakur’s writing and interviews have contributed to a growing activist and academic interest in recovering the centrality of the experiences and contributions of Black women in the Black Power era.[48] Writing in the Nation of Islam’s newspaper The Final Call in 2002, reporter Nisa Islam Muhammad summed up Shakur’s iconography of Black revolutionary femininity: “Assata Shakur is a Black American folk hero. She is a freedom fighter that escaped the chains of oppression. She made it to the other side. She is a sister that defied the definitions of expected behavior by a Black woman.”[49] Shakur, who also happened to be the godmother of slain hip hop icon Tupac Shakur,[50] eventually achieved a visibility in the lyrics of hip hop artists that, for African American women historical figures, has been surpassed only by Harriet Tubman.[51]

Shakur’s characterization of herself as an “escaped slave” taking refuge in the 20th-century internationalist “palenque” of Cuban sanctuary underscores both the durability of the idea of slavery in the African American political imaginary and the intersections between the U.S. Black freedom movement and Cuba’s project of internationalist solidarity. Understanding contemporary racial inequality for African Americans as a condition rooted in the historical terrain of America’s unresolved legacy of slavery, Black radical activists such as Shakur drew vivid metaphors likening the persecution of contemporary Black freedom fighters with that of their ancestors who endured and resisted slavery. The metaphor of Shakur as a runaway slave resonated powerfully with her supporters. Writing in Essence shortly after the release of Assata, one writer observed that Shakur’s prison escape, executed in a manner reminiscent of “our enslaved ancestors,” had made Shakur a modern day folk legend.[52] The echoes of slavery in Shakur’s persecution, incarceration, and escape to Cuba also reverberated in the statements of police and political officials. When the State of New Jersey announced its $1 million bounty in 2005, for instance, New Jersey State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes revealingly declared: “she is now 120 pounds of money.”[53]

The repeated invocations of slavery’s legacy in Shakur’s writings to articulate both her political condition as an asylee in Cuba, as well as the subject status of people of African descent in the United States, particularly those caught in the webs of the criminal justice system, suggests that for Shakur, slavery continues to haunt modernity. Shakur’s continual deployment of ideas about slavery and freedom to explain her subjectivity—first as a “New Afrikan” neo-slave held hostage within the carceral plantation of the U.S. prison system, then as a prison fugitive and an “escaped slave” harbored within the urban Black and multi-racial “underground railroad” of radical activist communities that had sheltered her while she was underground, and finally, as a modern “maroon” in exile in Cuba, an island refuge that had provided her with liberation from the neo-enslavement of prison but not yet true freedom, due to both repeated U.S. attempts to engineer her return to the “plantation” of mass incarceration and the continuance of anti-Black racism in post-revolutionary Cuba itself— offers a glimpse of the limits of Cuba as both a material and discursive sanctuary for African American activists.

Indeed, the persistence of structural racism in Cuba after the revolution, and the survival of anti-Black attitudes, has repeatedly revealed latent tensions between Cuba’s place within the U.S. Black radical imagination, which sometimes idealized Cuba’s racial climate, and the lived realities of race in Cuba. These tensions have sometimes been given voice by African American activists who visited Cuba or sought political asylum there. As has been documented elsewhere, Robert F. Williams and Eldridge Cleaver publically questioned Fidel Castro’s commitment to anti-racism and criticized the Cuban government for failing to promote Black Cubans into high offices, and for failing to support their ambitions for armed struggle inside the United States.[54] Stokely Carmichael broke off his support of Cuba in 1968, accusing Castro of placing class concerns above race, before later re-aligning himself with Cuba in the 1970s. Although Shakur has not publically voiced critiques of the Cuban government’s handling of racial issues and repeatedly praised Cuba’s efforts to bring about racial equality as well-intentioned and often quite effective, she had readily acknowledged that the dream of a racially egalitarian society had not yet been achieved. Racism in Cuba or any other nation, she maintained, could not be overcome in one generation. It “had grown out of slavery and exploitation,” she told visiting Americans from the humanitarian group Pastors for Peace in 2000, “and was very hard to eradicate quickly and completely.”[55]

As scholars such as Alejandro de la Fuente and Devyn Spence Benson have demonstrated, the Cuban revolutionary process after 1959 has represented both the severing and recuperation of preexisting Cuban racial ideologies, resulting in significant amelioration of racial disparities even as forms of racism have survived. Racial inequality in Cuba, including in the key indices of health, life expectancy, and educational attainment appeared to be the lowest of any nation in the Americas by the 1980s.[56] Nonetheless, racial inequities persisted, and Cuba found itself ill-prepared to address them. Cuba’s long-standing discourses of raceless nationalism, dating back to the 19th-century independence struggles, and later claims by the post-1959 revolutionary leadership to have solved the issue of racism by addressing material inequality, foreclosed open discussion of persisting inequities on the island in the post-revolutionary period. In this climate, open discussion of racism in Cuba became virtually taboo, and the Cuban government was censorious of Afro-Cuban voices who attempted to raise the issue. Although Fidel Castro had formed the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC)—the Federation of Cuban Women—in 1960 to institutionalize initiatives for women’s equality, no comparable national organization devoted to ensuring racial equality was ever formed. The FMC became, along with the Central Committee, a conduit through which Shakur forged links between the Cuban government and Black left-wing organizations in the United States, and an avenue through which to identify ways to address Cuban racial inequality. Given the limited number of channels through which political grievances may be debated in Cuba, as well as her status as a protected guest of the Cuban government, it is possible that Shakur retains critiques of Cuba’s racial climate that she is not able to air publically.

Shakur’s concern for the lingering shadow of slavery and racism, however, is supplemented by visions of liberation rooted in revolutionary optimism. Shakur’s political ideology may be characterized as profoundly hopeful about the possibilities for social justice and, in particular, the potentials for the emancipation of the African diaspora from anti-Black racism and neo-colonialism. Shakur’s deliberate optimism, rooted in the political ideology of the BPP, which contended that Black liberation in America was attainable through revolutionary struggle, had now also become influenced by Cuban revolutionary theory, which advocated the creation of a new society through collective multi-racial struggle and socialist redistribution—articulated by Che Guevara in racially universalist terms as the “New Man.” Cuba’s longstanding nationalist discourses celebrated the island’s historical struggles for national self determination against foreign dominion, first by the Spanish, then by the United States. Consolidated by the post-1959 revolutionary regime, which had successfully resisted U.S. efforts to destroy it, these nationalist discourses became the fertile ground for a new political optimism regarding the possibilities for national liberation worldwide through anti-imperialist struggle. “Optimism … has been one of the psychic vitamins that has fed me since I’ve been here,” Shakur told one interviewer in 2000. “I’ve seen that internalized by people in such a way that people feel empowered to build this planet and to change it.”[57]

Shakur and U.S.–Cuba Relations Beyond the Cold War

The Reagan administration’s 1982 designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism” initially had little to do with the Caribbean nation’s harboring of U.S. political asylees. However, as Shakur’s autobiography arrived in U.S. bookstores and the former Black Panther began to grant interviews to foreign reporters, the increased attention on American fugitives in Cuba during the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with a pivotal global development—the breakup of the Soviet Union—that would influence the fate of U.S. asylees living on the island. As Cuba’s economy continued to languish in the mid 1990s, Washington increased its efforts to engineer regime change. In March 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act, known popularly as the Helms-Burton Act, which aimed to “assist the Cuban people in regaining their freedom and prosperity, as well as in joining the community of democratic countries that are flourishing in the Western Hemisphere.”[58] Greatly strengthening the U.S. embargo against Cuba and deploying a list of strict preconditions for Cuba to fulfill in order to achieve normal diplomatic relations with the United States, the Helms-Burton Act, passed within months of the release of William Lee Brent’s autobiography, Long Time Gone, included “the expulsion of criminals from Cuba” as one such requirement for the normalization of U.S.–Cuba relations. “The President,” Section 113 of the Act read, “shall instruct all United States Government officials who engage in official contacts with the Cuban Government to raise on a regular basis the extradition of or rendering to the United States all persons residing in Cuba who are sought by the United States Department of Justice for crimes committed in the United States.”[59]

The issue of U.S. asylees was now fully imbricated within U.S. foreign policy toward the island. In March 1998, New Jersey Congressman Robert Franks sponsored a Congressional Resolution calling on the Cuban government to extradite Shakur. Condemning recent media interviews with Shakur that had showed her “living freely in Cuba, portraying herself as the victim,” the resolution concluded with a statement urging that the United States “should not ease any restrictions currently in place with respect to Cuba before Ms. Chesimard is extradited to the United States.”[60] Cuban officials, however, refused to concede Havana’s right to grant asylum, and reminded U.S. officials of the absence of an active extradition treaty. Cuban Foreign Ministry spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez explained Havana’s rationale for declining Whitman’s request: “The [Cuban] government has reasons to disagree with the accusations made against her and fears she may be the object of unfair charges.”[61] The Cuban government also took exception to the broader terrain of Washington’s efforts to extradite Americans, as U.S. officials had leveled demands at Havana without any indication that Washington was willing to reciprocate by returning Cuban exiles residing in the United States who were wanted for extradition by Cuba on similar criminal charges, including terrorism and murder. Indeed, the text of the proposed H. Con. Res. 254 had argued, in language that invoked the full hubris of U.S. exceptionalism, that nations “should respect each other’s justice systems and not provide safe-harbor to individuals who have been indicted or convicted of criminal offenses.”[62]

In a letter addressed to several members of the House regarding H. Con. Res. 254, Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner criticized the bill as “hypocritical,” citing convicted or accused terrorists and dictators who had received asylum in the United States, including the Cuban-born, Central Intelligence Agency– trained Orlando Bosch, suspected of orchestrating the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in 1976, now living in Miami; and Haitian death-squad leader Emmanuel Constant, which the Clinton administration had declined to extradite to Haiti to face trial.[63] Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who had voted in favor of H. Con. Res. 254, now staged their own protest through the bloc’s Chair, Maxine Waters. Claiming that the Caucus had not realized that the Congressional bill pertained to Shakur because the text referred to one “JoAnne Chesimard,” not Assata Shakur, Waters penned a letter to Fidel Castro to apologize for the vote, affirming her support of “the right of all nations to grant political asylum to individuals fleeing political persecution,” including “the sovereign nation of Cuba.”[64]

Speculation about the possibility for improved U.S.–Cuba relations in 1999 during the twilight of the Clinton administration led to renewed media interest in the fate of the asylees. With tourism to the island increasing—a result of the Cuban government’s bid to lure foreign capital into the country—Cuba’s community of U.S. asylees increasingly feared bounty hunters.[65] Then, in June 2001, the U.S. Congress passed an amendment to the Helms-Burton act known as the “No Safe Haven in Cuba Act,” which classified the extradition of American fugitives as one of the criteria by which Cuba must prove that it was a democracy. “Respect for the rule of law,” the bill read, “is a primary condition for the establishment of any legitimate democratic government.” According to the text of the act, its purpose was “to require that, in order to determine that a democratically elected government in Cuba exists, the government extradite to the United States convicted felon Joanne Chesimard and all other individuals who are living in Cuba in order to escape prosecution or confinement for criminal offenses committed in the United States.”[66]

With the inauguration of George W. Bush, the stakes of Washington’s designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism increased exponentially. In 2004, amid the full force of the War on Terror, whose rhetoric now eclipsed anti-communism as the primary discourse used to frame U.S.–Cuba relations, the U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2004 named Cuba as one of the world’s four “state sponsors of terrorism,” together with Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The report listed three reasons for Cuba’s inclusion on the list: “Cuba [has] continued to actively oppose the US-led coalition prosecuting the global war on terrorism,” and has “continued to provide limited support to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, as well as safehaven for terrorists” such as Spain’s Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), and Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN).[67] The report’s discussion of Shakur and other U.S. asylees who had been granted “safe haven” in Cuba situated their alleged crimes within prevailing definitions of terrorism.[68]

But U.S. efforts to extradite Shakur were just beginning to gain traction within the rhetorical framework and repressive state apparatus enabled by the War on Terror. As a 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, issued coincidentally on the twentieth anniversary of a deadly police bombing, by helicopter, of a house belonging to the predominantly Black MOVE organization in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985[69], observed that, “supporters of keeping Cuba on the terrorist list point to the more than 70 fugitives from U.S. justice residing in Cuba. These include such fugitives as: Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973.”[70] The designation of Cuba as a terrorist state was now firmly bound up with Havana’s provision of sanctuary for U.S. radicals. That same year, the State of New Jersey announced a $1 million dollar bounty, up from $150,000, for information leading to Shakur’s apprehension. The FBI’s “wanted” poster characterized the BLA as a “revolutionary activist organization” and noted that Shakur, known to “wear her hair in a variety of styles and dress in African tribal clothing,” was wanted for a litany of charges: “Act of Terrorism, Domestic Terrorism, Unlawful Flight to Avoid Confinement, [and] Murder.”[71] In Havana, rumors circulated that foreign bounty hunters had arrived, asking questions about Shakur.[72] Cuba’s most famous foreign political asylee, whose phone number had once been listed in the Havana phonebook, now dropped out of sight as her FBI poster reappeared bearing the new reward—an astronomical sum of money on the island—inside the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

Living at undisclosed locations and reportedly moving every few months, Shakur was now living “underground” on the island, protected directly by the Cuban intelligence service.[73] Protected by the Cuban government, Shakur’s safety was treated as a mater of Cuban state security. Castro himself now publically entered the fray, rejecting calls for her extradition in a televised address and excoriating U.S. officials for characterizing Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism for harboring Shakur while simultaneously allowing Luis Posada Carilles, another mastermind of the 1976 Cubana de Aviación bombing, to reside unmolested in Florida. Although Castro did not refer to Shakur by name, there could be no doubt about whom the Cuban leader was referring. Defending Cuba’s provision of political asylum to an unnamed fugitive accused of shooting a New Jersey police officer, Castro characterized the individual as a victim of “the fierce repression against the black movement in the United States” and “a true political prisoner” who had sought protection against persecution. “They wanted to portray her as a terrorist,” Castro charged, “something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie.”[74]

Responses to the $1 million bounty within leftwing circles in the United States came swiftly. As “hands off Assata” committees formed in several U.S. cities, activists highlighted the historical and conceptual links between U.S. imperial antagonism toward Cuba and the American government’s historical repression of Black radical activists. Kathleen Cleaver, who had been a Black Panther leader when her husband, Eldridge Cleaver, had sought political asylum in Cuba in 1968, condemned the new bounty for Shakur as “lynch-mob diplomacy.”[75] Hip hop artist Mos Def defended Cuba’s provision of asylum in an essay entitled, “The Government’s Terrorist is our Community’s Heroine,” writing that Cuba was “exercising its political sovereignty” in sheltering her.[76] In New York, a pitched battle ensued at City College of New York in fall 2006 after a police association learned that students there had named a clubroom in the student center after Shakur and William Guillermo Morales, a member of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña, linked to a series of bombings in the United States, who had received asylum in Cuba after escaping from the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital in 1979. Although the college’s administration had initially supported the students, the chancellor of the City University of New York ultimately ordered the names removed from the clubroom’s entrance.[77] The New Jersey State Assembly then filed a resolution, referencing Shakur’s 2005 inclusion on the FBI’s domestic terrorist list, supporting the chancellor.[78] Speculation about the fate of Cuba’s U.S. asylees was also increasingly tied to the fate of Fidel Castro himself. In July 2006, after the Cuban government revealed that Castro was suffering from a serious intestinal ailment, leading him to cede authority to his younger brother, Raul Castro, U.S. media attention again focused on the likelihood that a transition of power on the island might alter Havana’s commitment to sheltering foreign asylees.[79]

The dawning of the Obama era was accompanied by a mild thaw in U.S.–Cuba hostilities, and with it, continued media speculation about the fate of the island’s U.S. asylees.[80] New Jersey lawmakers lost little time in making their demands known, with Senator Sean T. Kean writing to Obama in April 2009 urging the president to “delay normalizing relations with Cuba unless they agree to extradite convicted cop killer JoAnne Chesimard.”[81] When hip hop artist Common was invited to the White House to perform during a poetry event in May 2011, rightwing pundits and police organizations protested the invitation, citing the lyrics of a song, entitled “A Song For Assata.” “She’s a domestic terrorist,” an official for the New Jersey State Police complained, “who wrapped her criminality and her abhorrent anti social behavior in a cause to try to disguise her disgust for America in this make believe 1960s radicalism.”[82] New Jersey Representative Scott Garrett wrote to President Obama to urge him to make Shakur’s extradition “one of the prerequisites for achieving normal diplomatic relations with Cuba.”[83]

Then on May 2, 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the turnpike killing of officer Werner Foerster and just two weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings, the FBI named Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist list, making her the first woman to attain the distinction and, according to the Bureau’s press release, “only the second domestic terrorist” to make the list. The FBI announced its own reward of $1 million for information leading to Shakur’s capture which, together with the State of New Jersey’s 2005 reward, brought the total reward to an astounding $2 million.[84] The FBI’s press release charged that Shakur “attends government functions and her standard of living is higher than most Cubans.”[85] Law enforcement efforts to apprehend Shakur were now imbedded, both discursively and materially, within the apparatus of Washington’s bid to maintain global dominance, legitimized through the War on Terror and prosecuted now by the Obama administration. In Cuba, Shakur remained under the watchful eye of Cuban state security, living at a safe house and protected by government bodyguards. Cut off from even her close friends and unable to participate in Havana’s public life, from which she had derived so much satisfaction and solace, Shakur descended into the isolation and loneliness of an exile within an exile. As one of Shakur’s friends, Cuban historian Tomás Fernández Robaína, put it in June 2013: “One of the things that I am most proud of is Cuba’s protection of Assata Shakur. But now she is like a great mystery in Cuba. We know that she is here and that she is okay, but not for how long.”[86]

Conclusion

Uncertainty about Shakur’s fate rose back into news headlines in December 2014 with joint public announcements by the governments of Cuba and the United States that a process of diplomatic normalization had begun. As global attention focused on the historic event, which seemed to herald the end of half a century of hostility, opponents of Shakur, including Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, called on President Obama to make Shakur’s extradition a condition for normalization. But Cuban officials flatly refused, with deputy director for American affairs at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gustavo Machin, telling a reporter from Yahoo News that Shakur’s extradition was “off the table” because she had been granted political asylum. “There are very serious doubts about that case. … We consider that a politically motivated case against that lady.”[87]

The status of Shakur, whose fate is now bound to the shifting tides of U.S.–Cuba diplomacy and unprecedented transformations within Cuba itself, may hold one key to the future of relations between the island and the remnants of the Black Power era and new generations of the African American freedom struggle, and indeed the U.S. Left more broadly. While Cuba has steadfastly protected its U.S. political asylees, any retreat from this stance, particularly in the case of Shakur, who occupies a profoundly significant status for the contemporary U.S. multi-ethnic radical Left, will likely cause irreparable harm to Cuba’s credibility within the African American left specifically, which has historically been the Cuban Revolution’s most consistent base of U.S. support. Whatever the future may hold, Cuba’s provision of sanctuary to Shakur provides important insights into the historical relationship between post-1959 Cuba and the African American freedom struggle, illuminating the way in which the island’s revolution has figured into the U.S. Black radical imagination as a compelling, if sometimes fraught, terrain of radical hope. Cuba’s provision of political sanctuary for embattled U.S. Black activists became a means through which the Cuban government extended valuable aid to the bourgeoning African American freedom movement while also asserting its self-determination in the shadow of the United States amid the geopolitics of the Cold War. Now spanning more than three decades, Shakur’s asylum in Cuba provides a window onto the volatile nexus between the historical forces of Cuba’s revolution, the African American freedom struggle, and U.S. imperial power, forces that have been repeatedly in engagement and confrontation since 1959.