Glenn Garvin - Cuba still shelters U.S. fugitives

Glenn Garvin: Cuba still shelters U.S. fugitives
BY GLENN GARVIN
02/02/2015 6:20 PM 02/02/2015 6:22 PM

Having already announced that the United States will reestablish full
diplomatic relations with Cuba and eased American travel restrictions to
the island, President Obama is now at work on removing the Castro
brothers' family farm from the State Department's list of state sponsors
of terrorism.

He's ordered a "review" of Cuba's status on the list, to be completed no
later than May. Given the president's flexible morality when it comes to
Cuba — he's already released a Cuban spy who was also serving two life
sentences for conspiracy to commit murder — there's little doubt how the
review will turn out.

And it's true that most of the guerrilla groups that Cuba used to
support around Latin America have either turned to legitimate politics
or gone out of business altogether. These days, the Castros support
terrorists who've struck at just one country: the United States.

Cuba began providing safe haven for accused American criminals early on.
In 1961, a black militant leader from North Carolina accused of
kidnapping a white couple during a racial disturbance evaded the FBI and
arrived in Havana.

By 1968, U.S. fugitives were arriving with regularity, often aboard
hijacked airplanes. Many were members of self-proclaimed revolutionary
groups who carried out their political agenda with bombings, bank
robberies and murder of police officers drawn by Cuba's open embrace of
anyone who claimed to be carrying out "armed struggle" against
non-communist governments.

"We understood that if anything ever happened in the U.S. and we had to
leave, the best thing was to come to Cuba," explained Charlie Hill, a
member of a militant group called the Republic of New Africa that wanted
to form an independent black nation in the American South.

Hill and two other members hijacked a plane to Cuba after shooting and
killing a New Mexico police officer who wanted to search their car,
which was loaded with guns and dynamite. His comments were made to
Teishan Latner, a research fellow at NYU's Center for the United States
and the Cold War, whose forthcoming book, Irresistible Revolution: Cuba
and American Radicalism, 1968-1992, offers a revealing look at the Cuban
government's treatment of the fugitives deemed genuine revolutionaries.

The Castro regime gave them ration cards and free housing. One large
Havana home was known as Hijack House because so many of its occupants
arrived on pirated aircraft. Neighbors referred to another as Casa de
las Panteras for the all the fugitive Black Panthers living there.

These revolutionary pilgrims got many privileges not available to
ordinary Cubans, including the loan of AK-47 rifles for hunting
expeditions. To be fair, Castro came to regret that one when his
relations with exiled Black Panther chief Eldridge Cleaver — who fled to
Cuba after a shootout with Oakland police — went south.

Cleaver chillingly reminded the government he had guns. After a tense
standoff of several weeks, there was mutual agreement that Cleaver would
move on to Algeria.

For more pliable fugitives, the rewards were bounteous: college
educations and cushy jobs. Some worked at propaganda stations beaming
revolutionary rhetoric at the United States. Others taught English at
elite Havana schools.

William Lee Brent, a Black Panther who hijacked a plane after shooting
three San Francisco cops, was a Cuban emissary to the left-wing
government of Grenada during the 1980s before his death from pneumonia.
Assata Shakur (who originally went by the name Joanne Chesimard), a
member of the cop-killing Black Liberation Army convicted of murder in
the death of a policeman during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike,
became a hostess for delegations of international leftists. Presumably
they're impressed by such diplomatic credentials as her place on the
FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists and the $2 million reward posted
for her capture by U.S. law enforcement.

As recently as the 1990s, the FBI had a list of 91 fugitives from
terrorist-type charges living in Cuba. But age and disillusionment have
taken a toll, and researcher Latner believes there are no more than two
dozen left, perhaps only half that.

Still, they include some big names: Ishmael LaBeet, one of five men
convicted of the infamous Fountain Valley Massacre, a racially tinged
1972 armed robbery in the Virgin Islands that turned into mass murder,
with eight dead. William Morales, the master bomb-maker of the Puerto
Rican separatist group FALN, which set off 140 or so blasts around the
United States during the 1970s and 1980s, killing at least six people.
Victor Gerena, an armed robber working for another Puerto Rican
separatist group, who is believed to have taken the proceeds of a $7
million heist to Cuba with him.

The biggest of all remains Shakur.

She used to be a star attraction on the Cuban government's cultural
reception circuit, but has virtually disappeared in recent times. "I
think they are definitely worried about bounty hunters trying to grab
her," says Latner. Maybe Obama's easing of travel restrictions to Cuba
will have a silver lining after all, at least for the FBI.

Source: Glenn Garvin: Cuba still shelters U.S. fugitives | The Miami
Herald The Miami Herald -
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/glenn-garvin/article8960348.html