There are quite a few dramatic, almost folkloric, stories about Assata Shakur, the American militant and self-avowed anti-government revolutionary who escaped from prison in 1979, not long after she was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper. But a relatively quiet one stands out to me.
During a walk, a police officer stopped and asked her for her papers. Her offense: She was black. It was the very sort of racist, dystopian targeting Shakur spent her life attempting to combat. Which is why it is richly ironic that this happened in Cuba, the place where she sought refuge from the racism and oppression of the U.S.
How did she reconcile this? "Look there's racism here, there's racism in the United States," she told CNN in Havana in 1998. "The difference is that the people at the top in the United States are the ones perpetuating that racist system, and the leadership here are trying to dismantle it."
