Fugitives from U.S. ponder life after Castro

By Marc Lacey

Sunday, May 13, 2007

HAVANA: These are uneasy times for a man on the lam in Havana.

Charlie Hill, an accused murderer and admitted hijacker, has lived 36 years as a fugitive of U.S. justice. With the Cuban government providing him an offshore haven, he has managed to live a life beyond the reach of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But the years are catching up with him. Some of his fellow fugitives have died recently, forcing Hill, a 57-year-old grandfather whose hair, once a black Afro, is now closely cropped and grey, to confront his own mortality.

Inextricably linked with his fate is that of his patron, Fidel Castro, who is 80 and in failing health. For obvious reasons, Hill and other fugitives who have long been protected by Castro are hoping for the longtime leader's recuperation and for a continuation of the Communist government that has long butted heads with Washington.

"I don't think there will be much change if Fidel dies," Hill said. "There might be, but I think it's 60-40 that not much will happen. If it does, well, what can I do?"

The United States also shelters fugitives wanted abroad - most notably an anti-Castro militant, Luis Posada Carriles - but the U.S. government puts the number of people wanted by its law enforcement agencies hiding out in Cuba at about 70. Those who have called the island home since the 1960s and '70s are far fewer.

They include Assata Shakur, formerly Joanne Chesimard, a leader of the Black Liberation Army, who is one of the most notorious of the fugitives.

She has a $1 million bounty on her head in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. She once listed her number in the Havana phone book, under her new name, but now lives out of view and under the protection of the Cuban authorities.

What spooked her is not clear. One U.S. official who was based in Havana said he once stuck a wanted poster into her fence, just to let her know that her case was not forgotten.

However much the fugitives wish that their pasts would fade away, reminders crop up. Fugitives here know that their cases are raised every year in the State Department's terrorism reports. In the latest one, issued in April, Washington accused Cuba of harboring and aiding terrorists from Spain and Colombia, as well as fugitive Black Panthers and Puerto Rican independence militants.

A controversy at the City College of New York last year reached fugitives here as well. City University officials ordered the renaming of a student center that was dedicated to Shakur and another fugitive, Guillermo Morales, who was arrested on bomb-making charges in 1978 after he accidentally blew off all but one of his fingers in his Queens apartment.

Morales escaped from custody in New York in 1979 and made his way to Mexico. The authorities there let him go to Cuba, where he is still spotted around Havana.

Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, introduced legislation in the House of Representatives in January intended to put pressure on Cuba to extradite Morales and the other fugitives.

"I'm furious," said King, who described himself as a distant relative by marriage of a victim of one of Morales' attacks. "To have these people walking freely in Havana, given sanctuary by Castro, is disgraceful."

Cuba sees things differently.

Castro stuck up for Shakur in 2005, accusing Washington of portraying her "as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie."

Castro applies the terrorist label to another fugitive, Carriles, who is wanted in Venezuela to face trial on charges of blowing up a Cuban airliner, killing all 73 people aboard.

Carriles, a former CIA operative, denies involvement in downing the airliner, as well as Cuban claims that he is responsible for a string of bombings at Havana hotels and nightclubs.

A U.S. federal judge in Texas on Tuesday dismissed charges of immigration fraud against Carriles, who sneaked into the United States illegally in 2005.

In winning his release from jail, Carriles, 79, argued that he was getting up in years, that he posed no flight risk, that all he wanted was to spend his remaining days with his family.

On both sides of the Florida Strait, it seems, old age is taking its toll.

Hill wound up in Cuba in 1971 after he and two other members of a group, the Republic of New Afrika, were stopped by a state trooper outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, while transporting arms and explosives. One of them, Hill does not say who, shot the trooper, Robert Rosenbloom, in the throat.

The three, all in their 20s, then forced their way into the Albuquerque airport and hijacked a TWA jet. They left behind their dream of creating a separate nation for American blacks.

Both of Hill's co-defendants have died in Cuba: Ralph Goodwin drowned years ago at a beach near Havana and Michael Finney succumbed to throat cancer in 2005.

"I need to quit," Hill said of the cigar habit that he shared with Finney.

Another fugitive from a similar hijacking several years earlier, William Lee Brent, also died recently. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper's portion of Colon Cemetery, where eight coffins are stacked atop one another and then topped with concrete. Brent, who was 75, holds position No. 5.

"I'm not into grave markers," said Hill, who is a religious man these days, a follower of Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion popular on the island. "I believe you leave your mark on the living."

Hill said he has resigned himself to never seeing the United States as a free man again.

"I'm not ever going to stroll down Broadway," he said. "If I make any stroll in the States, it will be in prison. That's a reality."

One he intends to avoid.

At times, he seemed to creep close to apologizing for his actions, or at least regretting them.

"Everyone has regrets," he said. "In retrospect, I think everyone thinks they would have done something differently."

But then, his hard-line attitude, the one on display that day outside Albuquerque, takes over. "If you put me back in that situation again," he said, "I would have done the same thing."