Kudos are in order for the Daily Beast's Michael Daly and his attention to how "Cuba Protects America’s Most Wanted."
While many in the liberal media are uncritically heralding President Obama's push for normalized relations with the Communist dictatorship, Mr. Daly points out the matter of how the Castro regime has granted asylum for American fugitives from justice.
With the prisoner exchange and the normalizing of relations with Cuba arises the question of the dozens of American fugitives enjoying asylum there—including a cop-killer on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List with a $1 million reward offered for her capture.
Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimard, escaped from prison in 1979 after being convicted of murdering state trooper Werner Foerster. She had been in a car with two fellow members of the Black Liberation Army when Foerster and another trooper pulled them over on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Shakur was on the run for five years after her prison break before managing to reach Cuba, where she was granted asylum in 1984.
In 1997, the New Jersey State Police wrote to Pope John Paul II asking him to raise the question of Shakur with Fidel Castro on an upcoming visit to Cuba.
Whether the pope did or not, Shakur continued to live undisturbed in Cuba despite a 1998 resolution by the U.S. Congress asking that she be returned. She was joined by her daughter, who was conceived while Shakur was in a New Jersey prison and initially raised by Shakur’s own mother in New York.
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Among the roughly 80 other American fugitives in Cuba is Ishmael Ali LaBeef, who hijacked an airplane after he and four buddies murdered eight innocents during a robbery at a Virgin Islands golf course in 1972.
There is also Victor Gerena, who is wanted in connection with a $7 million armored car robbery in Connecticut in 1983.And then there is William Morales of the Puerto Rican independence group the FALN. He lost most of both hands while assembling a device in an FALN bomb factory in 1979, but managed to escape from a hospital ward where he was being fitted for prosthetic hands after being convicted of weapons charges and sentenced to 99 years.
Morales made his way to Mexico, where an effort to capture him led to a shootout, which ended with a local cop being killed. He served five years in a Mexican prison but then was allowed to board a plane for Havana despite American efforts to extradite him.
The most wanted of the fugitives is still Shakur, who remains in Cuba 17 years after the New Jersey State Police’s entreaty to Pope John Paul II.
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In announcing the end of the embargo, President Obama was clearly happy to announce that Americans visiting there will even be able to use their credit and debit cards.
The question is whether we will be doing so in a country that continues to shelter cop-killers and a terror bomber and a mass murderer.
To read the full piece, click here.
