Assata Shakur Still Died in a Prison
Those eulogizing the American fugitive should pause to reflect on the realities of the island that she made her home.
I was reading about the 14-year prison sentence handed down by a court in Santiago de Cuba against 36 year-old Ana Ibis Tristá Padilla for crimes of “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “acts against state security” when I read about the death of Assata Shakur née JoAnne Byron across the island in Havana.
Shakur had escaped a U.S. prison in 1979 and subsequently fled to Cuba after being found guilty by an all-white jury in March 1977 of first‐degree murder in the killing four years earlier of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster during a gun battle on the New Jersey Turnpike. Widely described as the slain rapper Tupac Shakur’s godmother, Shakur and a former member of a fringe terrorist group - there is not other accurate label one can use to describe them - called the Black Liberation Army (BLA), in the years since her flight and reappearance in Havana, Shakur become something of a totemic figure for those who believed themselves on the radical left. Many of the tributes that poured in for her amid the news of her passing boasted of how she had “died free” in exile. Rep. Ayanna Pressley - someone whose politics I generally rather like - wrote “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains. Rest in Peace and Power, Assata Shakur.” Rep. Yvette D. Clarke weighed in that “If there is a single truth in this world, it is that Assata died a free woman. May she rest in power and paradise for all eternity.” The Chicago Teachers Union called Shakur “a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
Shakur’s guilt or innocence for the crime she was convicted of remains the subject of intense debate. Clearly, the composition of the jury did not remotely reflect “a jury of one’s peers” in her case. Defense lawyers at the trial contended that Shakur had been shot while her hands were over her head, a contention supported by two defense-hired physicians on the basis of an examination of X‐rays taken while she was recovering from her wounds and an examination of her scars thereafter which they said proved “her arms and hands had to be raised above her head.” But another trooper who had been wounded during the confrontation, James M. Harper, described how Shakur had shot him and, during her trial, despite denying that she had shot any member of the state police or even handled a weapon, Shakur was unable to explain how three clips of ammunition and an eyeglass containing 16 live shells hid got into her shoulder bag. One of the other defendants convicted of taking part in Foerster’s murder, Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Edward Squire), who had driven the car that night, was paroled in May 2022 after 50 years in prison, with his attorney telling journalists that Acoli “was very movingly understanding of the tragedy that had happened…He genuinely expressed this deep feeling of sympathy.”
Did Shakur help kill Werner Foerster that night along the New Jersey Turnpike? I don’t know. The BLA had certainly killed quite a number of people before, including cops, and would go on to rob banks and hijack planes. The Black Panthers, which Shakur had been a member of before the BLA and which she critiqued in her 1988 autobiography, also had their fair share of predators and miscreants in their upper echelons linked to, among other crimes, the torture-murder of 19 year-old Alex Rackley in Connecticut in 1969, the 1974 kidnapping and murder of Betty Van Patter in San Francisco and the almost endless litany of crimes committed by party co-founder (and, acccording to its own members, habitual rapist) Huey P. Newton. On the other hand, police can and do lie and the U.S. government’s relentless targeting of black activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s is well known. Her own denials - you can watch them here in a 1998 interview with WNBC reporter Ralph Penza - don’t seem particularly convincing to me, but judge for yourself.
What has been more curious to me, as Shakur’s celebrity grew over the years, though, was, despite her desire to portray herself as a militant and radical on behalf of oppressed people everywhere, were her pronouncements after she arrived in Cuba, and her selective mutism - at best - regarding the terrible injustice and oppression she witnessed everyday there. Much like the revisionism that sought to cast the cruelty that was the bread and butter of the late Charlie Kirk in a flattering light, I found the fawning tributes to Shakur that obfuscated her passion for sanitizing the sadism of the regime whose hospitality she lived under pretty hard to swallow.
For more than 60 years, Cuba has been led by Fidel Castro (1959 to 2008), Raúl Castro (2008 to 2019) and Miguel Díaz-Canel (2019 to present) - three white men - as they have presided over a police state that in its early era rounded up and tortured gay men in concentration camps (an experience searingly documented in the book Antes que anochezca by Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas), aided liberation struggles elsewhere in Latin America and in Africa while denying its own citizens the ability to choose the political or economic system by which they wished to be governed as thoroughly as South Africa’s grotesque apartheid regime ever did and which has remained passionately hostile to independent expressions of Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ identity. Shakur had lived in Cuba since the mid-1980s and frequently lied about conditions on the island to flatter the ruling regime there.
In a 1996 interview with David Yaffe, a unreconstructed British communist and the father of University of Glasgow professor Helen Yaffe (who strongly defended the Cuban government’s mass incarceration in the wake of 2021 protests on the island and slandered the protesters themselves), Shakur claimed that “even in the Special Period [the extended period of economic crisis in Cuba that began in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union] we don’t see the kind of poverty in Cuba that we see in the United States.” A 2008 analysis by the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA), however, concluded that daily caloric consumption in Cuba during this time fell from 3,052 calories in 1989 to 2,099 in 1993 (the recommended minimum is 2,100 to 2,300 per day). It was estimated that, for those dependent solely on state rations, the daily caloric intake fell even further to 1,450 calories per day. A letter published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal concluded that during the Special Period, “Cubans essentially experienced a famine: adults had an average daily protein intake of 15–20 g and lost an average of 5%–25% of their body weight.” Books such as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Trilogía sucia de La Habana and La nada cotidiana by Zoé Valdés vividly depict the hardships of this period.
In the same interview, Shakur also demonstrated a bizarre, paranoid misunderstanding of what youth culture in the United States was like at the time, claiming that, while in Cuba “ any young person can go to a concert…and dance until dawn,” while back in in the United States “you just can’t do that, it’s too dangerous or too expensive.” As someone who, along with many millions of others, greeted the dawn after nights out in New York, Miami and elsewhere during this exact period during my well-spent or misspent youth, it’s hard to imagine what country she is talking about but it sure wasn’t the United States in the mid 1990s.
In her autobiography, Shakur would also claim that “child prostitutes” were something so foreign to Cuba she had to explain what they were to Cubans when, in only a few years, the most debased kind of sex tourism - not a small percentage of it underage - would come to flourish on the island. The Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto wrote vividly of this in her 1998 article for the New York Review of Books “Love and Misery in Cuba,” which begins with a description of drunken Mexican, Italian and Spanish sex tourists and then continues, searingly
At Twenty-third and Línea, Havana’s central crossroads, young girls gathered from early in the morning in front of the Habana Libre hotel, dressed and painted for display. Passing them, I tried to convince myself that they were over sixteen...I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be no attempt to zone prostitution, to restrict it to certain types of hotels or certain neighborhoods or otherwise hide it from view.
During all of this - Cuba’s economic implosion, the balsero crisis of rafters fleeing Cuba movingly depicted in the 1997 documentary Adios Patria?, the maleconazo protest of 1994 - Shakur never spoke out. Far from it, in 1998 she wrote to then Pope John Paul II to inveigh about “human rights violations in the U.S” and advocate on behalf of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal (someone unquestionably guilty of the crime he was convicted of despite the creepy cult around him), all while praising the tyranny she herself lived under as “a country that is rich in human wealth, spiritual wealth and moral wealth.”
In her interview with Yaffe, Shakur went on to say that she felt “very hopeful and encouraged by Cuba’s openness.” A few years later, during Cuba’s Primavera Negra (Black Spring) of 2003, when the regime threw dozens of people, including 29 journalists, into prison after what Amnesty International called “hasty and manifestly unfair trials” and executed three men who had attempted to hijack a ferry to the United States after what Human Rights Watch called “after summary trials violates basic human rights standards,” Shakur again said nothing.
In a 2014 “open letter to the media” in which she complained about not being depicted to her liking in an interview with NBC News, Shakur unironically signed off “Free all political prisoners, I send you love and revolutionary greetings from Cuba, One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) that has ever existed on the face of this planet.” Interviewed by CNN, she said that “there’s racism here [in Cuba but the] difference is that the people at the top in the United States are the ones perpetuating that racist system and the leadership here are trying to dismantle it.” In her autobiography, she wrote “I eventually became convinced that the Cuban government was completely committed to eliminating all forms of racism. There were no racist institutions, structures, or organizations, and i understood how the Cuban economic system undermined rather than fed racism.”
Oh really?
Today - more than six decades after the “revolution” - white Cubans are five times more likely than black Cubans to have a bank account and control 98% of the island’s private businesses. When I spoke to the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who grew up in Cerro, one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods and one that has one of the richest traditions of Afro-Cuban culture, in 2020, he gave me his assessment that
The Cuban regime is weighted on the basis of white men — macho, patriarchal, white men — with white women and wives as well. Cuban television and all the Cuban cultural apparatus still operate on a racist basis. One of the great themes in Cuba is that when Castro comes to power, he erases racism with the stroke of a pen, and now there is no more racism and you can’t talk about it and everyone who talks about it is counter-revolutionary. Therefore racism remains intrinsic within society. Racism does not evolve backwards, it is not capable of dying, because it is entrenched within the nation.
Less than a year after my conversation with Otero Alcántara, in July 2021, protests over shortages of basic goods, economic hardship and the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic began in the western city of San Antonio de los Baños. The protests soon spread all over Cuba in an unprecedented display of frustration and civil disobedience as thousands of Cuban citizens took to the streets chanting both “patria y vida” after a popular song and “change the system.” Initially taken by surprise, Cuban security forces responded with brutality and mass arrests of protesters, with Miguel Díaz-Canel appearing on state television to say “the order to combat has been given.” Hundreds of people (including at least 44 minors) were arrested. The government cut off internet access around the island, but it was too late. The images of protests and the merciless response of state security forces quickly were seen around the world.
The protests laid bare the often thinly disguised racism in the paternalistic discourse of the island’s Communist elite, at this point little more than a wretched, bloated ruling caste guarding their hotels (the Cuban regime spends 14 times more on tourism than they do on healthcare). At the height of the July 2021 protests, Aleida Guevara March, the daughter of Che Guevara (whose own caustic racism led him to label people of African descent as “lack[ing] an affinity with bathing” as well as being “indolent … spending [their] meager wage on frivolity or drink”) huffed that the protesters “showed a very low level of culture.” A subsequent report by Human Rights Watch recounted how the Cuban government “systematically engaged in arbitrary detention, ill treatment of detainees, and abuse-ridden criminal prosecutions in response to overwhelmingly peaceful antigovernment protests.”
When I spoke to the Afro-Cuban journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa a few months after the protests, he told me flatly that “the Cuban government sells itself as a leftist, progressive government, but the reality is just the contrary. Historically, those who occupy the highest positions here are almost always white… It’s structural racism and it’s clear how it functions in Cuba.”
After the protests, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was imprisoned and sentenced to five years for “contempt” and “public disorder” at around the same time the well-known Cuban rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez was sentenced to nine years in prison after trials that Amnesty International called “a shameful example of the human rights crisis caused by the Cuban government’s decades-long policy of repression.” The pair now form part of the nearly 1,200 political prisoners the regime currently holds, a number that includes the Cuban rapper and visual artist Nando OBDC, Cuban journalist and author José Gabriel Barrenechea, the Youtuber Sulmira Martínez Pérez aka Salem, the author María Cristina Garrido, 23 year-old Mayelín Rodríguez Prado (sentenced to 15 years in prison for the “crime” of livestreaming protests in the central town of Nuevitas protests on Facebook), more than a dozen people given near-decade long sentences for protesting against the island’s chronic blackouts and, increasingly, the families of those already imprisoned, such as Ana Ibis Tristá Padilla, with whose story I began this essay and whose husband, Damián de Jesús Hechavarría Labrada, is serving a five-year sentence. for protesting a fine for selling medicinal herbs, for which he had a license.
Amnesty International characterized Cuba last year thusly
The authorities continued labelling activists and journalists as “common criminals, mercenaries and foreign agents” and called independent media outlets, journalists and influential individuals that criticize state policies “financial and media terrorists”...The authorities subjected artists, intellectuals and other critical voices to arbitrary detention including in their homes, with serious implications for their privacy and right to freedom of movement…Repressive tactics against dissent included the criminalization and harassment of activists, journalists and human rights defenders, internet shutdowns, and fines under cybersecurity legislation…The authorities subjected human rights activists and defenders, including relatives of prisoners, to alarming harassment and surveillance…Persistent patterns of repression targeting activists, human rights defenders, artists and journalists included bans on leaving the country and forced exile.
The regime, which blames a non-existent “blockade” for all its ills (a talking point frequently repeated by its supporters abroad), is in fact sitting on an immense pile of money, chiefly in terms of the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA), the octopus-like Cuban-military controlled conglomerate that the Cuban art historian and writer Carolina Barrero described as “not a conventional economic entity [but rather] a tool of the military and repressive apparatus [funding] activities that include mass surveillance, the repression of dissidents, and social control.” A report by the Miami Herald earlier this year revealed that GAESA currently holds $18 billion in assets, larger than the international reserves of entire nations like Costa Rica, Uruguay and Panama. There remains two Cubas, one of luxury hotels, trendy bars and a dollar economy that the Communist and military elite and tourists swan around in and a Cuba of desperation, blackouts, misery and repression for everyone else.
Exile is a complicated thing. Who knows what kind of compromises Assata Shakur had to make, both with her hosts and with herself, during her years spent in Cuba. One conclusion seems clear, however. Though her own freedom was of great importance to her, the freedom of actual Cubans never seemed to inspire her to any kind of statement or action whatsoever. Though the Cuban regime may have represented escape and a type of freedom for Shakur and her supporters, it has long represented a prison for its people and it continues to do so. As some eulogize Assata Shakur, spare a moment to also remember the lives and dreams of generations of Cubans that have been destroyed by a despotism that she and many others so often defended.
I will close this meditation with the words of the imprisoned artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, someone who many of Assata Shakur’s admirers in the United States probably have never even heard of but from whom they could learn a lot about their much vaunted expertise in “freedom.” From his his prison cell earlier this year, Otero Alcántara wrote the following
When I close my eyes, in deep sleep, my soul goes out to walk with my loved ones...Only love and memory make us eternal. I still have the taste of the last kiss of July 11th. My family is waiting for me...Because of all this I will never stop believing in you, in me, in us and in love.
