The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement that her death, at age 78, occurred “as a result of ill health and advanced age”
14ymedio, Madrid, September 26, 2025 — The American Joanne Chesimard, born Joanne Deborah Byron and known as Assata Shakur, former member of the Black Liberation Army and a fugitive from justice for killing a police officer in 1973, died on Thursday in Havana at age 78. She lived 40 of them as a refugee in Cuba.
Her death was reported this Friday by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a brief note, saying that it occurred “as a result of health conditions and her advanced age” without giving details. The text mentions her by her birth name and “war” name as a member of the Black Liberation Army, one of the most violent branches of African-American activism, which she joined in 1970.
A year later, she joined another extremist organization, the Republic of New Afrika, which sought to weaponize the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana into an independent black majority nation.
Born in New York in 1947, she became one of the symbols of U.S. black liberation movements. On May 2, 1973, she was arrested for the murder of a state policeman in New Jersey and charged with other crimes. Convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment, she escaped two years later from a maximum security prison in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.
After a few years on the run, Shakur arrived in Havana in 1984, where Fidel Castro granted her political asylum. Although she was not in the public eye and never gave interviews, she did publish her memoirs in 1988 under the title Assata: An Autobiography.
Havana’s systematic refusal to extradite her, despite repeated requests from Washington, was one of the reasons for friction between the two countries. Shakur was among the FBI’s most wanted terrorists since 2005, and the reward for her capture was $2 million.
Even Raúl Castro did not give in during the so-called diplomatic thaw in 2015, under the presidency of Barack Obama, when bilateral meetings were held on the subject. At that time, there was even the possibility of exchanging Shakur for Ana Belén Montes, the U.S. intelligence agent then in prison for spying for Cuba, now free [and living in Puerto Rico] after serving her sentence.
Assata Shakur was one of the reasons put forward by the current Trump administration to re-include Cuba, last May, on the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with anti-terrorist efforts,” from which it had been excluded under the Biden administration.
In his statement reporting this re-inclusion, Secretary of State Marco Rubio specified the reasons: “There were at least 11 U.S. fugitives from justice in Cuba, including several facing terrorism-related charges, and the Cuban regime made it clear that it was not willing to negotiate their return so that they could be brought to justice in our country.” Among them were Shakur and William “Guillermo” Morales, a Puerto Rican independence activist sentenced to ten years in prison in 1979 for making bombs, one of which killed four people at a tavern in New York.
Morales still lives in Havana, where he married and had children. As Rubio stated last January, when the U.S. again demanded his extradition from Cuba, two policemen died when they tried to arrest Morales in Puebla (Mexico), before his escape to Cuba.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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