By Ethan Freedman
HAVANA – Over the past three decades, a number of Americans wanted for politically-related killings have successfully sought asylum in Cuba.
U.S. diplomats point out, for example, that there is a $1 million reward out for a former Black Liberation Army foot soldier Assata Shakur.
Shakur, now in her 60s and formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, is wanted in the killing of New Jersey state trooper in 1973. In a daring 1979 prison break, fellow revolutionaries succeeded in getting Shakur out of jail and she surfaced in Cuba, as Newsday first revealed in 1987.
One of those linked to the prison breakout -– and also to the 1991 upstate New York Brinks robbery that led to the death of a law enforcement officer -– is Nehanda Obiodun, also now in her 60s.
Obiodun, on the run from law enforcement, eventually fled to Cuba in the early 1990s. Obiodun has been involved in the hip-hop music movement in Havana.
Shakur and Obiodun have lately been keeping relatively low profiles in Cuba, though a Cuban official told Stony Brook University’s Journalism Without Walls that Obiodun had been seen recently and “did not appear well.”
Among other U.S. fugitives who were known to be, or believed to be, in Cuba are:
-Victor Manuel Gerena, a former bank security guard who is accused of robbing an armored car company in Connecticut in 1983. He made off with more than $7 million in one of the largest robbery hauls in U.S. history. He has been on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive list for years, and like Shakur, has a $1 million bounty on his head.
-Roberto Vesco fled the U.S. in 1972 to avoid facing charges following allegations that he stole $224 million from a Swiss-based mutual stock fund. He had been in Cuba since 1982. Fourteen years later, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for illegally marketing a drug he claimed could cure cancer and AIDS, in Cuba. Cuban records indicate he died, in prison, of lung cancer on Nov. 23, 2007, at age 71.
Wayne Smith, who once headed the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba and is now on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, said he does not believe the issue of the fugitives is high on the list of concerns of top Cuban and U.S. officials.
In the past, however, FBI agents and New Jersey State Troopers have said they will always insist that Shakur and others be extradited to the U.S.
Dear Doctor,Thank you for answering my cnoemmt. One issue that should worry you as a doctor has to do with the conditions under which Cuban doctors live and work. When doctors appliy for a government permit to leave Cuba, they are placed under close scrutiny for 10 (ten) years and have no rights to travel abroad or apply for a better position until they leave. Consequently, any problem or mistake could land them in jail for counterrevolutionaries. By the way, those Americans that are given free medical school in Cuba can go back to the US and become self-employed. In the meantime, the Cuban people are being deprived of the most basic needs to give support to those Americans, many of which could not make the cut to enter a regular American medical school (I am a professor and know how the system works). A PERSONAL ANECDOTE: My uncle suffered a stroke recently and my family in Cuba cannot find cream, nor “pampers” to collect his urine and fecals. So far, I have spent hundreds of dollars already sending jello and other liquid foods for him ($6 a pound). Every phone call is charged $1 a minute of which the government collects 90 cents. The system is simply unworkable and they are still there because Chavez, from Venezuela, supports them. With the money I send,my family goes to government stores that only sell to people with dollarsPlease, when you come back to the states, talk to Cuban doctors and find out the real truth. Remembers, statistics are a way of manipulating reality, and the Cuban government has made an art of it. ONE more thing: the Cuban press does not publicize medical mistakes, people that die due to lack of higiene in hospitals, etc. All health news are a state secret.