'Hands off Assata!'
By Deepa Fernandes
Her name is Assata Shakur. Assata "She who Struggles" Shakur "the Thankful". They call her JoAnne Chesimard, and they want her as an accomplice to murder.
I met Assata last New Year's Eve in Havana. She is a political refugee. She escaped from prison in New Jersey in 1979 and arrived in Cuba five years later to her first taste of "freedom" after 15 years of hiding from the law, and being imprisoned and tortured for crimes she never committed. Assata would probably say it was her first taste of freedom since her birth into the segregated US south and the racist system of that country.
While living in Havana this year I crossed paths many times with US citizens who now call Cuba home. They are white and African American, from various backgrounds, choosing to live in a system completely opposed to the one into which they were born and raised.
The stories of how many African-Americans came to reside in Cuba are like action thriller movie scripts. They had risked everything to fight their racist oppressors and were either wanted by the US state, or convicted for crimes they never committed.
Assata was never given a chance to defend herself publicly from the time she was arrested in 1973. This she began to do from the moment she arrived in Cuba in 1985.
Because of what Assata says, and who she threatens, her story hasn't made it to the masses.
In 1973, Assata was wanted for a series of bank robberies, the kidnap and murder of a drug dealer and the attempted murder of a policeman. Having been a Black Panther and then prominent in the Black Liberation Army, Assata is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's target list.
Assata never committed a bank robbery, or kidnapped or murdered anyone. Successive juries acquitted her on all these charges. Three cases against her were dismissed by the judge for a farcical lack of evidence.
They eventually got her for being the accomplice to the murder of a state trooper who pulled over at the New Jersey turnpike. Assata was convicted on the evidence of another state trooper who said he saw Assata pull a gun from her pocket book and shoot the other trooper.
Under cross-examination, he admitted that he had never seen Assata with a gun and that he had lied. But Assata didn't have a chance.
Aside from the all-white jury and the white judge, Assata was poor. She didn't have the money to pay full-time lawyers. Just as the trial was to begin, one of her lawyers was found dead; "natural causes" the police said. The New York police seized all of Assata's legal papers as "evidence" and only returned some a month later. She never saw most of the papers again.
Assata was shot by the police at the turnpike three times. They left her for dead on the side of the road. Three neurologists testified that the gunshot wounds severed her median nerve, making it impossible for her to pull a trigger. They also testified that two gunshot wounds to her clavicle could only have been inflicted when her arms were raised above the head.
Then there was the police's inability to find the residue on Assata's fingers immediately after she was arrested that is present when someone has fired a weapon.
Assata's daughter, Kakuya, was born in prison, while Assata was awaiting trial. Kakuya was raised by Assata's mother and now lives in New York.
Assata's is very clearly a case of trial by the mass media. The newspapers of the day created an image of her as the crazed, wild beast, capable of any crime, and the whole fabricated case against her was perpetuated by the media.
Every bank in New York and many buses displayed large "wanted" posters displaying Assata's face. The media reported exactly what the New Jersey police wanted and even when Assata was proven innocent of every bank robbery, kidnap and murder charge they laid against her, her innocence never rated a mention in any of the media that had called for her blood.
A few weeks after I met Assata, she received information via the internet that her prosecutors, the New Jersey police, had petitioned Pope John Paul II to advise Fidel Castro to extradite her. Cuba and the US do not have an extradition agreement.
The Pope came and went, and Assata stayed.
The media's complicity with US state governments' racism in the 1960s and '70s. Just one afternoon at the public library in Manhattan scanning newspapers from the time left me incredulous: of the numerous crime and murder stories reported, the only ones accompanied by visual stimuli were those in which black people were accused. Assata's "mug shot" was among them.
The well-orchestrated media attack on Assata continues today. Not long ago, NBC-NY TV News taped a one-hour interview with Assata in Havana. Assata was told the interview was in regards to themes she raised in her open letter to the Pope concerning the corrupt justice system in the US, police brutality and Cointelpro.
What went to air was a story about Assata living it up in Havana. The report was followed by an interview with the pained and angry widow of the dead state trooper, then further lies from the New Jersey police.
As African-American political prisoner on death row in the US Mumia Abu Jamal has said, the media have "no time for the victims of the police and members of the families of citizens killed by the police or tortured by the police".
This is year 13 in Cuba for Assata. In May, Ricardo Alarcron, head of the Cuban parliament, publicly stated that Assata would not be returned to the US because the Cuban state was satisfied that she was a human rights activist and shouldn't be imprisoned. I could feel the New Jersey cops and politicians boiling with rage!
This woman does not belong behind bars. She never did belong there. But the saga continues and Assata is now even hotter property.
The New Jersey governor seems confident that Assata will be brought back to face her sentence, but just in case this does not happen through legal channels, he has put a bounty on her head. A great all-American challenge, issued to anyone, to bring Assata back to the US for a rosy financial reward.
Why, in the land where one is supposed to enjoy freedom, liberty and justice, has this been so systematically denied to Assata? And not only to Assata, but also to Sundiata Acoli, the brother with whom Assata was arrested and who just got another 20 years for the supposed murder of the state trooper after already serving 20 years.
One just has to look at the US prison population to realise that this freedom, liberty and justice has been denied to too many African Americans and other people of colour.
African Americans label the US a "police state". With prisons now one of the securest financial investments in the US, the Sundiata Acolis of this world will undoubtedly be serving repeated sentences. Their slave labour means that it is "good business" to extend current sentences, and the police presence on the streets in black communities has intensified.
Black people were in the days of the Black Panthers, and still are, the prime target of the incarcerators' wrath (and now the jailers' profits), and "cop killers" — that is, political activists — like Assata Shakur are the worst kind.
Assata's fight is not alone. She is supported by many in the African-American community who are shouting, singing, writing and rapping about her courageousness.
From the hip-hop group The Last Poets, to poet Andres Petit, who calls Assata the "Palanque Queen", to the Black Radical Congress, which dedicated their 2000-strong June conference to Assata, to her support committee in New York — all are fighting under the slogan "Hands off Assata!". Once and for all.
For more information, read Assata, An Autobiography (ISBN 0-86232-757-1) or visit Assata's web site at <http://afrocubaweb.com/assata.htm>.