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U.S. radicals find haven
in Havana
Illinois native Charlie
Hill is one of dozens of Americans who fled
to communist Cuba in the 1960s and '70s
to escape U.S. justice
By Gary Marx, Chicago
Tribune foreign correspondent. June
4, 2006.
HAVANA -- The United States has designated
Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, placing
it alongside such nations as Iran, Syria
and North Korea.
One reason for this distinction is 56-year-old
Charlie Hill, an Illinois native who loves
NBA basketball, homemade cornbread, AM talk
radio and The New Yorker magazine. But 35
years ago, as a member of a black separatist
group, Hill allegedly killed a New Mexico
state trooper, hijacked an airliner and
fled to Cuba, where President Fidel Castro
has given refuge to Hill and other fugitives
from American justice.
U.S. authorities have been trying to get
their hands on Hill since.
"I'm a revolutionary in exile,"
said Hill, who grew up in the Downstate
farming community of Olney. "I'm always
going to be an American. But I'd rather
be here in Cuba, free. I don't intend to
be in nobody's jail."
There are many issues dividing Cuba and
the United States, but few have been as
explosive in recent years as the charge
that each nation is harboring the other's
terrorists.
Castro demands that U.S. authorities extradite
Luis Posada Carriles, a militant Cuban exile
accused of blowing up a Cuban airliner in
1976, killing all 73 aboard. Posada Carriles
remains in U.S. custody after an immigration
judge ruled that he cannot be deported to
Cuba or Venezuela, where the downed plane
originated, because he could be tortured
there.
Cuba also has asked the United States to
return three Cuban-Americans allegedly implicated
in the airline bombing and a separate plot
to kill Castro, according to the U.S. State
Department's 2005 Country Reports on Terrorism
released this April.
In the reports, U.S. authorities once again
designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism
and demanded that Castro deport Hill and
dozens of other fugitives who are suspected
to be living as ordinary civilians in Cuba.
But the claim is moot.
"There are fugitives in Cuba, but
I can't say definitively how many,"
said James Schield, the U.S. Marshals Service's
chief of international investigations. "Even
if we knew, the lack of an extradition treaty
means we can't get them out of there."
Schield said he believes most of the fugitives
are Cuban citizens who committed crimes
in the U.S. and fled to avoid prosecution.
But Hill is one of a handful of American
holdovers from the 1960s and 1970s, an era
when hijacking planes to Cuba was a common
escape route for radicals seeking refuge
in a sympathetic country.
Others arrived here clandestinely by boat,
including Black Panther leader Huey Newton,
who spent only a short time in Cuba in 1977
before returning to the U.S., where he was
subsequently shot and killed by a drug dealer.
Some of the fugitives who returned to the
U.S. ended up in prison.
Home equals jail time
Richard Dixon, a self-described revolutionary,
spent four years in Cuba after hijacking
a plane there. He sneaked back into the
U.S. and later killed a Michigan police
officer. He is serving a life sentence.
"Even though the Cubans were good
to us, it was not our home," said Dixon,
65, in a telephone interview from the Kinross
Correctional Facility in Kincheloe, Mich.
"You just get homesick."
But Hill said he decided to remain because
he's certain that returning home would mean
a life sentence. New Mexico officials agree.
"Even if we couldn't get the death
penalty we'd love to try [Hill] and make
him pay for the crime that he committed,"
said John Denko, secretary of the New Mexico
Department of Public Safety. "He's
a murderer."
Born into a working-class family, Hill
said he always had enough food and clothing
growing up in Olney. But there were few
blacks in the community, and he said he
faced constant racism in the form of slurs
and other mistreatment. "I was always
getting into fights and hassles," he
recalled.
Hill left Olney when he was 12. Over the
next decade he fought in Vietnam, discovered
radical politics and joined the Republic
of New Afrika, a fringe group that had taken
up arms to establish a separate nation for
African-Americans.
"At the time, that seemed so feasible
to me," he explained. "What can
you say?"
On the night of Nov. 8, 1971, he was driving
a Ford packed with explosives and guns across
the country. New Mexico State Trooper Robert
Rosenbloom stopped the car just west of
Albuquerque and began a search. Seconds
later, Rosenbloom was shot in the throat.
Hill won't say whether he or one of his
accomplices, Ralph Goodwin and Michael Finney,
pulled the trigger. But he insists Rosenbloom
was killed in self-defense.
"I'm not glad that someone was killed,
but it's just basically this: If it hadn't
been him, it would have been us," Hill
said.
Several weeks later the three men hijacked
a TWA jet to Cuba. Goodwin drowned in the
1970s at a beach outside Havana. Finney,
who worked as a radio broadcaster in Cuba,
succumbed to throat cancer last year.
Hill lives on a quiet Havana street in
a dingy, one-bedroom flat with a disconnected
telephone. "It was cut off several
years ago because I ain't got the money,
man," he said.
Cuba calls them activists
Cuban authorities describe militants like
Hill as political activists deserving of
asylum because they faced persecution in
the United States.
Last year, Castro spoke out in support
of Joanne Chesimard, a black nationalist
who fled to Cuba after escaping from a U.S.
prison in 1979 while serving a life sentence
for killing a New Jersey state trooper.
Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur,
denies the charges. U.S. authorities are
offering a $1 million reward for her capture.
"They wanted to portray her as a terrorist,
something that was an injustice, a brutality,
an infamous lie," Castro said.
Despite Castro's protection, Chesimard
keeps a low profile in Cuba, fearing bounty
hunters may try to snatch her. But Hill
says he is not afraid because he doesn't
have a price on his head.
"I don't lose no sleep over it,"
said Hill. "It was in the '80s that
I realized I was never going to leave Cuba
unless the Cuban government changed in a
radical way."
Hill arrived in Cuba as an atheist and
is now a babalawo, or priest, in the Afro-Cuban
religion of Santeria. On many afternoons,
you can find him hanging out at a neighbor's
house, sipping bootleg rum and chatting
in Spanish.
But Hill also was imprisoned twice for
financial fraud and marijuana possession
and battled alcoholism. Friends in the U.S.
send him several hundred dollars every few
months; Hill does not have a steady job
other than acting as a guide and translator
for tourists.
He has a 21-year-old daughter and a grandchild
in Cuba but he can't shake his longing for
the United States. A second daughter, who
lives in Detroit, refuses to have anything
to do with him. His parents died while he
was a fugitive, and his son, whom he never
met, was shot to death three years ago in
Alaska.
On a nightstand next to his bed sits a
15-year-old Panasonic boom box that Hill
uses to follow news and sports on AM stations
broadcasting from across the Florida Straits.
"You know, I hear about Tim Duncan
and LeBron James on the radio, but I don't
know what they look like," said Hill,
referring to two NBA stars. "They don't
put the NBA on Cuban TV."
Copyright © 2006, Chicago
Tribune
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