Joanne Cheismard, aka Assata Shakur, was a member of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. In the early 1970s, she amassed quite a resume of mayhem, culminating in a 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shootout in which she killed state trooper Werner Foerster. She was convicted in 1977 and served some time in the prison system, escaping in 1979. Cuba granted her political asylum in 1984. She still lives there.
Would it have been too much to insist on handing her back over as part of this normalization business?
Ain't gonna happen. Once again,
post-America gets took:
. . . the Castro regime has
no plans to return a "persecuted" Chesimard, who is on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list, so she can finish her prison sentence.
Cuba said Monday that it has a right to grant asylum to U.S. fugitives, the clearest sign yet that the communist government has no intention of extraditing America's most-wanted woman despite the warming of bilateral ties.
Chesimard was granted asylum by Fidel Castro after she escaped from the prison where she was serving a sentence for killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 during a gunbattle after being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Asked if returning fugitives was open to negotiation, Cuba's head of North American affairs, Josefina Vidal, told The Associated Press that "every nation has sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted. ... That's a legitimate right."
"We've explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum," Vidal said.
The fruits of planned decline.
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