From Cuba, an exile looks homeward
HAVANA --Charles Hill had not been home that night, and a pale and lovely Sunday morning reached him through the worn red curtains of a bar where he was buying rum doubles and restlessly making an account of his life.
"Lenin said it. The next thing to death is exile, brother," he said.
There are times when Hill considers Nov. 20, 1971, the day he left home, landing in Cuba aboard a TWA 727 that he had hijacked at gunpoint from a gate at the Albuquerque, N.M., airport.
He was 21 years old then, a militant in the radical New Republic of Africa movement and the Black Panther Party. He was being hunted for the murder of a New Mexico state trooper shot a few weeks earlier on a desert highway.
Hill is a familiar figure in the crowded and friendly passageways of the Colon section of Old Havana. He speaks Spanish in the racing and lyrical Cuban way. He lives with a Cuban companion. They have a young daughter.
But even after 17 years, he is still known as "el americano." While protected from extradition by hostility between the United States and Cuba, he said he keeps a US passport. It is a link to a place that remains frozen for him, an artifact from a time when things went bad, a slim promise of homecoming.
"I'm looking for a deal, I'd accept a deal. I'd talk to these people." he said. "If I could do maybe five or 10 years, I'd go back, you dig. But the State Department says no deal. They want me 100 years in prison, man."
Hill is one of the few airline hijackers from the 1970s who remain in Cuba. Scores have elected to return to the United States to serve prison terms, especially after Cuba began giving them stiff sentences under a 1973 agreement with Washington.
Among hundreds of US citizens living on the island, most of them dual nationals, a few are celebrated fugitives. Robert Vesco, the financier wanted for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars and for donating some of them illegally to the reelection campaign of Richard M. Nixon, has a suburban mansion west of Havana. His children are said to live at the exclusive Hemingway Marina, named for the writer.
Assata Shakur, a leader of the Black Liberation Army, has lived quietly with her daughter in a small Havana apartment since 1984. Shakur, whose given name was Joanne Chesimard, made a famous escape from a New Jersey state prison in 1979 while serving a life sentence for the murder of a state trooper.
Shakur, who wrote her autobiography while living here, reportedly is studying for a degree in social science at Havana University.
Black radicals from the United States have long been welcomed in Cuba. Huey P. Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers who lived in Havana for several years as a fugitive, was treated as a political refugee from a capitalist society that President Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials often describe as pervaded by racial injustice.
During 30 years of revolution Cuba has tried to present a contrasting image of equality unmatched in the hemisphere. Troops now returning from Angola are being cheered as victors in what is portrayed by the government here as a war against the US-supported racist regime of South Africa.
Yet Hill's arrival here seems to have had less to do with Cuba than with circumstances in the United States that he now says placed him on a crash course with violence.
The son of a black mother and Cherokee father, he enrolled at age 16 at Laney College in Oakland, Calif., a stronghold of the Black Panthers during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dropping out, he fought in the Vietnam War with the 101st Airborne Division. Arrested there for leaving his unit, he said that he was discharged and returned home angry and confused.
After joining the clandestine Republic of New Africa movement, he and other members were involved in a shooting with police near Albuquerque. Hill insisted that he did not kill the state trooper, Robert Rosenbloom.
Weeks later, he and two companions, after burying themselves in the desert to escape capture, stormed the TWA jet with a rifle and knives and ordered it to Cuba.
No passengers or crew members were harmed in the hijacking, which was the 24th that year in the United States. After two days, the assault had disappeared from the news.
"I don't regret what I believed in. But the way we went about it was wrong," Hill says now. "I was young. I wasn't clear in my thinking. We misjudged armed struggle in the United States, and we didn't understand clearly the historical process of black liberation."
Arriving at Havana's Jose Marti Airport, Hill and his two companions, Michael Finney and Ralph Goodwin, were detained for two days and then sent by authorities to the countryside to cut sugar cane. Several years later, Goodwin drowned accidentally at the beach. Finney remains in Cuba.
"At first, a lot of groups in the United States wanted to help us, testify on our behalf," Hill said. "Now nobody knows what we're doing. Even here, nobody is much interested in our story anymore."
Hill has not escaped trouble in Cuba. He was arrested in 1979 for falsifying currency receipts, and according to records at the US Interest Section in Havana served two months of a four-year sentence. In 1986, he was jailed for eight months for possession of a marijuana cigarette.
He lives today with his girlfriend and 3-year-old daughter, Shawnely, in a tiny apartment in a working class neighborhood. They own the building's only television set. Like Cubans, he is provided a job by the state, translating documents and government manuals.
He said that his job and his trouble sleeping stretch out his free time. He hangs out. He continues to write a book about his experiences. He said the book has become an impossibly large and disorganized obsession. Like many Cubans, he scrambles to find reading material from outside the island.
He asks a reporter to send him books: current novels, nonfiction, anything about the process of perestroikain the Soviet Union, which he said he supports.
"What am I going to do with my life? Where the hell am I going to go?" he asked. "I've thought about the Soviet Union. I'd like to go to Russia. Maybe when Mr. Gorbachev comes here, he'll send me an invitation."
