ASSATA SHAKUR: A BLACK LIBERATION ACTIVIST
HAVANA- It was late on a humid night in May 2002, that I got my first – and only – glimpse of Assata Shakur during her time in Cuba. She had been in exile on the communist island for 18 years and was just days shy of her 55th birthday when I saw her.
That year, I led a group of 15 Black journalists to Cuba to report on the links between African Americans and Afro Cubans, and to gauge the impact people of African descent were having on this island nation 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
Once there, Nisa Muhammad, a member of our group, who wrote for The Final Call, the Nation of Islam’ s weekly newspaper, arranged to interview Shakur. A Black liberation activist, Shakur escaped prison after being convicted of killing a state trooper during a late-night shootout on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973 – and was being pursued by the FBI. Shakur, who had been a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, fled to Cuba in 1984.
Muhammad met Shakur in the Riviera, a seaside hotel that was built in 1957 by the American mobster Meyer Lansky. To break the ice, she took Shakur a couple inexpensive gifts; a pair of earrings, and a Jet magazine that I brought with me from the United States.
During their meeting, Shakur denied killing the trooper and told Muhammad that she had been the victim of the government’ s harassment of Black activists – a claim that the 1975 congressional hearings on the FBI’ s COINTELPRO program seemed to support.
“ When I was in the Black Panther Party, they( the FBI) called us terrorists. How dare they call us terrorists when we were being terrorized,” Shakur told Muhammad.
Ironically, in 2013, the FBI placed Shakur on its list of“ Most Wanted Terrorists.” At the time she had been living a quiet life in Cuba for 29 years and was the first woman to be placed on this“ terrorists” list since its creation 11 years earlier.
Despite its long manhunt and $ 2 million reward, the FBI never captured Shakur. While it hunted for her, Shakur was hiding in plain sight. Her address and both of her phone numbers were listed in a 1998 Havana telephone book.
Assata Shakur died of natural causes in Cuba on Thursday, September 25, 2025. She was 78. •
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