Fugitive States: The Life of Charlie Hill, a Black Radical Exile in Socialist Cuba, Teishan A Latner, 2026, University of North Carolina Press
Just two months ago the US State Department released a document that must rank among the most distorted and deceitful official publications of all time … anywhere.
“Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” claims that for six decades beneath the calm, business-like practice of America’s fabled and fair democracy, Havana has been busy stirring up the most significant upheavals in the country’s political history.
This work of children’s fiction literally hyperventilates as its unhinged authors paint a bizarre, hyperbolic and profoundly mendacious fantasy akin to the fairy tales told by medieval hags to frighten the younglings.
In short, if you really want to understand the Maga mind in all its conspiratorial imperial glory—and in particular that of the UFO-worshipping, outsized-shoe travesty of a secretary of state Marco Rubio—read this “report” … and weep.
It is a matter of record, nonetheless, that Cuba has long voiced its opinion about what goes on in the US and given its unabashed support to Americans waging struggles for equality out of a commitment to socialist internationalism. Who wouldn’t?
And this helps to explain why historically so many radical US émigrés—including prominent activists from within the black liberation movement—sought refuge on their island neighbour from overt and unrelenting political and racial oppression.
One of those refugees was Charlie Hill, today the last surviving and longest serving US exile in Cuba, whose importance resides in the fact that he was not a particularly prominent actor in the militant antiracist struggle against American fascism of the late 1960s and early 70s.
Accused of killing a police officer in New Mexico, in 1971 Hill hijacked an aeroplane to Cuba and was granted sanctuary by the revolutionary government.
Cuban officials were well aware of the harassment, trumped-up charges and political violence against civil rights organisers and Black Power radicals by police, the FBI, and ordinary racists in the US.
The Cuban press and cultural establishment derided Washington’s claims that the US was a beacon of colour-blind freedom and democracy, and hence Havana exercised its sovereign right to offer political asylum to American dissidents.
Black radicals who fled to Cuba included none other than Robert F Williams and Eldridge Cleaver. Those granted refugee status included Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party who, convicted of killing a New Jersey police officer, broke out of jail and made her way to Cuba in 1984.
Actor Teyana Taylor, who played the character Perfidia in the movie One Battle After Another, said she drew upon the story of Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, in her portrayal.
None of these efforts to shield ideological opponents of a given regime was in one direction: other than its noxious illegal embargo of Cuba, the US was also a haven for murderous anti-Castro terrorists, such as the CIA-trained Luis Posada Carriles.
Posada Carriles, let’s not forget, orchestrated the mindless 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner in which 73 people died that would shamefully stand as the deadliest act of aviation terrorism in the Western Hemisphere until 9/11 some 25 years later.
Charlie Hill’s story diverges little from the pattern of violent social struggle followed by overseas exile of his peers during a period in which the white US political elite were using extreme violence against black demands for equality and justice.
In his case, his radicalisation was sparked by his service in the Vietnam war, an important catalyst for others such as Black Panther Party leader Geronimo Pratt, who was framed by the FBI for murder and imprisoned for 27 years.
A decorated Vietnam veteran, Pratt had come to the conclusion that police treatment of black people in their own neighbourhoods was no different to that of the occupying US forces in Vietnam.
Hill was also a Vietnam veteran who came to a similar opinion during combat with the Viet Cong, plagued by a growing sense that he had joined the wrong side.
He deserted, found temporary refuge in Saigon, turned himself back in, served time in military jail, and was then discharged. It was a defining moment.
Teishan Latner writes: “Like so many others of the Black Power generation, Charlie’s experience in Vietnam was a watershed in his life. The war had finally made plain to him what it meant to be part of a world born of colonisation, racism, and empire.”
Hill would then be drawn into the black liberation movement, eventually joining the Republic of New Afrika, a dynamic black nationalist group that dreamed of a sovereign nation-state.
In November, 1971, accused of killing a white New Mexico state trooper, Hill and two comrades hijacked a passenger jet from Albuquerque to Havana.
He flirted with the aim of making contact with African revolutionary movements and reaching Angola or Guinea-Bissau to join the armed struggle against colonialism—but would in fact remain thereafter in Cuba, where he built a life.
Latner tells Hill’s fascinating story with the clear objectives of compiling the social history of a political exile who was not a prominent dissident, of exploring an individual’s conflicted emotions and homesickness, and of examining revolutionary history from his vantage.
The author is very aware that the history of Cuba, in the words of Ada Ferrer, “lends itself to monumental and epic tellings” populated with great figures and driven by magisterial historical forces. Most people experience far less high-profile stories.
As Latner writes: “Hill’s unique perspective, that of a North America who has lived in Cuba for half a century, encourages us to move beyond hackneyed binaries that imagine post-1959 Cuba as either a revolutionary nation without blemishes or an authoritarian regime without freedom, but rarely something else entirely.
“Hill’s life in Cuba is bound to both the shifting tides of US-Cuba relations and the ebb and flow of change within Cuba itself, a nation whose dynamic internal life belies travelogue cliches of an island ‘frozen in time’.”
Among the themes such an approach enables the author to explore is the complex issue of race in revolutionary Cuba—as experienced by Hill.
Latner notes that although the Cuban government advanced unqualified support for black liberation movements in the US—above all the socialist and internationalist Black Panther Party—there was little room for independent black politics on the island itself.
Afro-Cubans that Hill met lionised figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis while at the same time insisting on the dramatic levelling effects of the Cuban Revolution and that racism was being vanquished by the construction of socialism.
There is ample evidence that the most senior revolutionary figures up to and including Fidel and Raúl Castro, accepted the existence of racism, were committed to its eradication, and took concrete steps to achieve this. In 2019, President Miguel Díaz-Canel launched the National Programme Against Racism and Racial Discrimination, known as Color Cubano.
Yet although this year the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination commended Cuba’s “principled approach” to tackling racism, it also pointed to persistent structural inequalities.
Six decades after the revolution, racial disparities continue in areas such as employment, housing, access to basic services, economic opportunities, and the proportion of incarcerated people.
Latner also observes that “revolutionary policy had perpetuated a national silence on race even when faced with unmistakable evidence of racial inequality”.
The truth for Afro-Cubans has, therefore, been nuanced—especially since a process of economic liberalisation was forced upon Cuba in its efforts to survive the most extreme effects of the illegal and unremitting US blockade.
Yet are we to liken this experience with the US reality—the most extreme version of racism on the American continent, which appears only to be worsening, that revolutionaries such as Charlie Hill fought against and eventually fled?
It is clear from Latner’s book that Hill has always understood that Cuba is “not perfect” but has nevertheless embraced the difficult, incremental reality of building a socialist society constrained by severe structural obstacles and hostility.
In a statement issued last year, he reaffirmed his commitment to black liberation struggles and solidarity with other oppressed peoples signalling that, for him at least, the fight goes on.
As Latner writes: “This was socialism in a real nation of the twenty-first century, with all its contradictions and challenges, not some armchair theory of how the Cuban economy and society should be run.”
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Categories: Africa, Caribbean, Cuba, United States