The "black militant" mentioned here as taking refuge in Cuba is Assata Shakur. In 2013, she became the first woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. It is not a coincidence that she is also Black, nor that this happened almost 40 years after her alleged crime. 1/
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1348726592848199681
Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a Black Panther splinter group. She was found guilty of killing a state trooper in 1977, though the facts of the case are disputed. This NPR interview is a decent overview. 2/ npr.org/2013/05/07/181…
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the FBI & other national security bureaucracies did a lot of work to write the BLA, Black Panthers, & other groups into the emerging narrative that identified violence by people of color, particularly Black people, as terrorism. 3/
(Though, it should be noted, the NYPD was already calling the BLA a terrorist group in the '70s. And whatever language you want to use, the law enforcement response to the BPP & other Black left-wing orgs was brutal, cruel, and abhorrent.) 4/
Placing Shakur on the Most Wanted Terrorist list does not make the US safer, but it does signal the consequences of engaging in radical political activity against the state as a Black woman—as well as prioritization of a years-old case over current white supremacist threats. /fin
P.S. In case it wasn't obvious, the State Sponsors of Terrorism list has always been a political instrument to extract concessions from foreign regimes. See e.g. last year's removal of Sudan after normalizing relations w/ Israel. washingtonpost.com/world/africa/s…
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