Shortly after arriving in Cuba, Assata Shakur was stopped by a police officer. Not because she was a murderer of a police officer convicted of a fugitive in the United States, but because she was black.
As announced Friday by Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, it is clearly a member of the Black Liberation Army (presumably known as Tupac’s Godmother), who would later die at the age of 78 on a $2 million blessing.
In one of the few interviews she has admitted, I asked Shakur if she once found the revolutionary paradise she wanted in Cuba. She responded to me one day by telling me about a Cuban police officer who had asked for paperwork on the streets because of her skin colour – Afro Cuba had been complaining for a long time – but after realising that she was a foreigner, she quickly let her go.
“He thought I just thought I was a tourist,” Shakur told me. “There’s racism here, there’s racism here in the US. The difference is that people at the top of the US perpetuate what the racism system and leadership here are trying to dismantle it.”
It was 1998, and the Cuban startup revolution was barely hanging after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of billions of dollars in grants from Moscow. There was extensive hope that Fidel Castro’s socialist experiment might soon join the image of Marx and Lenin, and was sent to the ashes of history. And that would almost certainly mean a long prison sentence returning home for dozens of American fugitives hiding on a communist-run island.
I was a 21-year-old college student and had a summer internship with CNN’s Havana Bureau. There was a questionable concept to track down Shakur, our most desired fugitive in Cuba, who at that point had shunned the long weapons of American law enforcement.
It was surprisingly easy.
Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimado, was found guilty in 1977 for bombarding a New Jersey trooper, and after two years later he fled from prison and began running, he was granted political asylum by Castro in 1984.
For many in White America, Shakur was an unrepentant police killer and part of a domestic terrorist group that caused bombs and Rob Banks in the name of their struggle.
But for some black America, she was a revolutionary royal. Shakur herself, the godfather and step-aunt to rapper Tupac Shakur, became a symbol of law enforcement resistance to abuse at an age when the FBI spread illegal surveillance of left-wing groups.
Rebellious signs declaring “Assata Shakur is welcome here” have come to the homes of African American communities across the United States after his escape from prison.
Shakur considers herself a political exile and has been marked for an assassination by the FBI, and the Cuban government saved her life by granting her exile.
But she was our most desired fugitive on the island, but Shakur didn’t make it seem conspicuous at least at first.
She wrote books, appeared in documentaries, lectured to visiting students, and was once discovered in the VIP section of the annual Massive May Day Parade in Havana.
There were dozens of other US fugitives living in Cuba. Many of them became revolutionaries who arrived on the island, thinking that the government of Castro would provide military training to become the next Che Guevara, but instead they were given wise jobs and forgotten. Many people clashed with the society of Cuban regiments and spent time in prison for minor crimes.
A few years later, when he asked a Cuban diplomat why he continued his asylum to a group of nonconforming people who seemed unadapted to life in Cuba, he replied.
My break in pursuit of Shakur came when one of the former Black Panthers I met said he knew the island’s most wanted fugitive as he hijacked a passenger plane to Cuba and hustling as a guide for tourists.
They happened to meet in a shared taxi, but initially they adopted a fake name and what he described as an outrageous Jamaican accent. Finally, he wore her and she admitted who she was.
He knew how to contact her and some told me to go to the restaurant at Hotel Comodoro, on the outskirts of Havana after two nights.
At the appointed time, Assata Shakur stepped into an empty restaurant.
I was hoping she would have her bodyguard and the mind of the Cuban government to make her shadow, but she came herself, even if she didn’t know why she met me.
“What university did you say you went to?” she asked me.
When I said to her duke, she replied, “Isn’t that where the CIA does all their adoption?
For an hour she briefly dodged my questions about the incident that led to her murder conviction (suffering that Shakur could not pull the trigger as she was injured in the shootout).
After fleeing prison, Shakur refuses to answer again when she asked how she had arrived in Cuba.
“My friends helped me, but they could still get into trouble,” she said.
She seemed unrepentant of trying to carry out an armed revolution in the United States, except that her exiles came at the cost of Cubans.
“I’m sorry because I know they’re using me to punish Cuba,” she said.
She then asked me about life and politics in the United States, and about who I thought would win the 2000 presidential election. To me, eternal exile was probably pretty boring for most days and lived in the bubble of censorship of the Cuban government, so she was hungry for news from her hometown.
When she finally finished our interview and left for the night, I asked our waitress if she had seen the woman before.
“Yeah,” the waitress said, “She lives a few blocks from here.”
When I returned to Cuba as a CNN Havana correspondent 15 years later, I tried to track Shakur for my second interview, but her status in asylum was changed.
The FBI made her the first woman on the list of most wanted terrorists, increasing her reward to $2 million. The poster, with Shakur’s face and reward hanging from the US embassy in Havana, was seen by hundreds of Cubans every day while awaiting visa appointments. The Cubans were online for the first time, and there was a greater chance that she would be recognized. Someone might get a crazy idea as the US is on a 90-mile boat across the Strait of Florida.
As Shakur feared, her continued presence on the island was at a cost, and was one of the main reasons why the Trump administration was reviving Cuba on its list of countries that support terrorism.
I tried to find her at a house near the hotel Comodoro where she lived, but it seemed to have been abandoned for years.
There were no more books, interviews or lectures with students. I spoke to people who knew her and they said Shakur had just disappeared.
For some reason, in the age of ubiquitous camera phones and social media, there has been no single sighting of her for over a decade. Once again, Assata Shakur went underground. How she pulls it apart is the final mystery she carries with her to the grave.
