By DeWayne Wickham
Special to the AFRO
Charles Hill has spent the last 38 years in exile in Cuba. (Courtesy Photo/DeWayne Wickham)
|
DeWayne Wickham interviews Charles Hill outside Cuba's Hotel Nacional, the famous Cuban hotel that was once a hangout for American mobsters and Cuban elite before Fidel Castro came to power on Jan. 1, 1959. (Courtesy Photo/DeWayne Wickham)
|
(October 14, 2009) - HAVANA — By his own admission, Charles Hill is a skyjacker. Prosecutors in New Mexico say he's a cold-blooded killer, too. They want to try the one-time member of the Republic of New Afrika, a Mississippi-based Black separatist group, for the November 1971 killing of a state trooper.
Hill arrived in Cuba 38 years ago aboard a TWA flight that he and two other Black activists allegedly commandeered at gunpoint from the Albuquerque, N.M., airport 19 days after prosecutors say one of them shot trooper Robert Rosenbloom on an isolated stretch of New Mexico highway.
Back then, Hill and his companions, Ralph Goodwin and Michael Finney, were foot soldiers in a movement that advocated the creation of a Black nation — by ballot or bullet — in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. The car they were in that night had a cache of high-powered weapons and dynamite in the trunk.
"I regret that a life was lost, but it had to be that way," Hill told me. "He drew his gun and he was going to kill us."
That's Hill's version of what happened — one that New Mexico prosecutors would no doubt love to challenge in a U.S. courtroom. In fact, the FBI and New Mexico prosecutors, no doubt, hope the thawing relationship between the Obama administration and the government of Raul Castro will cause Cuba to ship him back to the United States.
Late last month, Bisa Williams, the deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, headed a U.S. delegation that was in Cuba for a one-day meeting to discuss re-establishing direct mail service between the two countries. Instead of returning to the U.S. after the talks ended, Williams quietly extended her stay for five days and held unannounced talks with a senior official of Cuba's foreign ministry -- the first of such high-level talks in seven years.
Despite his denial, Hill knows movement towards normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba doesn't bode well for him and dozens of other American fugitives in this Caribbean island nation. It'll ratchet up the pressure for his return to the U.S. to face murder and skyjacking charges.
"If it happens, it happens," he said, just moments after assuring me that Cuba won’t return him to the U.S.
In the years since his flight to Cuba, Hill has been a "fixer" for Americans who come to Havana. Fluent in Spanish, he prowls hotels looking for people from the States who need help navigating their way through Cuban society. He knows all the best restaurants and bars. He knows the best places to buy cigars, to rent a car or to satisfy a visitor's offbeat requests.
When a New York lawyer in the hotel where I was staying told Hill she wanted a reading from a Babaloo, a high priest of the Santeria religion that is widely practiced among black Cubans, he arranged it in a couple of hours. This is how Hill makes a living. The money he earns gives him a standard of living higher than that of most Cubans.
But, his life in Cuba is no paradise. Hill is a tormented man — tormented, I believe, by what happened on that lonely stretch of New Mexico highway 38 years ago. He doesn't say as much, but it doesn't take a psychiatrist to figure out he has demons.
"I'm a part-time alcoholic," he told me when he showed up in a drunken stupor an hour late for a meeting with me. "I'll be drunk for a week and then sober for three or four months."
During my talks with him over the past two years, Hill's alcohol binges always followed talk of Rosenbloom's killing. But when I asked Hill if there was a link between the shooting and his bouts of heavy drinking, he denied it.
"I started drinking because of me," Hill said, slurring his speech and pursing his lips as if to punctuate his words.
I don't buy it.
Hill yearns for the life he left behind. Whenever someone from the U.S. visits Cuba, Hill asks for any newspapers, magazines, movies or music CDs they might have brought with them. Every day, he gets up around 5 a.m. to listen to American radio broadcasts that overcome Cuba's efforts to block radio signals from the U.S.
Hill yearns to return to a place he knows he can't go. He would likely spend the rest of his life in prison if he ever goes back to the U.S.
Hill says he won't do that willingly — and doesn't believe the Cuban government would force him to return.
So he spends his days here in limbo, haunted by the memory of the crime that bought him to Cuba and the knowledge that he can never go home.
DeWayne Wickham is a columnist with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service. This article was originally published on his blog, “DeWayne Wickham - Disturbing The Peace.”