Assata Shakur, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives for over 50 years, dies in Cuba
The former Black Panther member, accused 52 years ago of murdering a police officer, was welcomed by Fidel Castro and always considered herself a political prisoner
Joanne Deborah Byron, aka Assata Shakur, died on Thursday in Cuba, the country that welcomed her as a refugee for decades after she staged a spectacular escape from the Hunterdon County maximum security prison after being accused 52 years ago of the murder of a New Jersey State Police officer. The island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a brief press release this Friday reporting that the U.S. citizen had died at the age of 78 “as a result of health conditions and her advanced age.”
Her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed on social media that her mother’s death occurred at approximately 1:15 p.m. on September 25, the time when she “took her last earthly breath.” “Words cannot describe the depth of the loss I feel right now,” her daughter said.
When she arrived in Havana, welcomed by Fidel Castro during the Cold War, the former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) was 36 years old and had been sentenced to life in prison in a 1977 trial that she herself described as a “legal lynching.” She was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery for the death of Werner Foerster, a 34-year-old police officer killed on May 2, 1973, after an altercation on the New Jersey Turnpike. Although several investigations suggested she wasn’t the culprit, and Shakur herself always denied it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) still had her on its most wanted list, offering a reward of one million dollars for her head.
Before the killing, Shakur was already an uncomfortable figure in the United States in the 1960s, due to her ties to the Black Liberation Army, considered a “radical leftist terrorist group,” her struggles for student rights, against the Vietnam War, with the Black liberation movement, and her membership in the Black Panthers. On more than one occasion, the fugitive stated that her fight went directly against the capitalist heart of her country. “I stand for the end of capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty,” she said in a 1997 letter to Pope John Paul II.
Some consider her a heroine, a symbol of the Black cause, while her country labeled her a “domestic terrorist.” However, she always considered herself a “political prisoner” or a “runaway slave.”
Although Havana was the city where she lived since 1984 after an escape that U.S. authorities have yet to explain, Shakur, who was born in Queens, New York, said that exile was not easy. On the island, she learned Spanish, pursued social studies, and raised her daughter.
Her name, which had always been on the table in negotiations between Cuba and the United States, made headlines again this year when the Donald Trump administration returned the island to the list of countries that sponsor terrorism for harboring dozens of fugitives from U.S. justice, including Charles Hill, the Republic of New Afrika party activist who hijacked a plane in Chicago and landed at Rancho Boyeros Airport; and Cheri Dalton, alias Nehanda Abiodun, a former member of the Republic of New Afrika party who died in 2019 in Havana. The U.S. Secretary of State, the Cuban-American Marco Rubio, recently said that “the Cuban regime continues to provide shelter to terrorists and criminals, including fugitives from the United States,” referring to Shakur.
The African-American activist died without anyone being able to recover the sum her head was worth, nor return her to the New Jersey prison that never stopped demanding her return. Some say she died “with total impunity,” while others celebrate the fact that she was able to spend her final days in the city she made her own.
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