Cuba Agrees To Talks About Fugitives, Including Joanne Chesimard

Cuba has agreed to talks with the U.S. about fugitives, including Joanne Chesimard, who live on that island nation, according to published reports.

The U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that Cuba agreed to talks about fugitives, according to an Associated Press report, posted on website of the New York Daily News.

The Miami Herald said the two nations planned to open talks about Chesimard, who is now known as Assata Shakur; William Morales, a Puerto Rican nationalist who escaped from the prison while serving a term for a fatal bomb blast; and other fugitives.

According to the Miami Herald, Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman said:

“We see the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of an embassy in Havana as the means by which we’ll be able more effectively to press the Cuban government on law enforcement issues such as fugitives.”

That announcement came a day after President Barack Obama told Congress that keeping Cuba on a list of state sponsors of terrorism could no longer be justified, the Miami Herald said.

Chesimard broke out of a New Jersey prison in 1979. She had been serving time for her role in the fatal shooting of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, who was killed on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick in 1973.

She eventually fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum, according to the Bergen Record.

Her attorney, Lennox Hinds, who is a criminal justice professor at Rutgers, told the Bergen Record he had recently been in touch Cuban authorities and was told that her asylum would not be revoked.

“I think it is a spin being put out by the U.S. government,” Hinds told the newspaper. “I have no reason to give any credence to it.”

In a recent column for American Police Beat, NJ State Police Colonel Rick Fuentes wrote:

“On December 14, 2014, in response to the U.S. president’s announcement seeking to open United States-Cuba relations, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie addressed a terse letter to the president, asking in the strongest terms that the extradition of Chesimard be included in any negotiations to normalize relations between the two countries. Other police associations and politicians have followed suit, throwing down a gauntlet of support that will be difficult to ignore.

“Remember that we owe an unfathomable debt of gratitude to those law enforcement officers who have given their lives in the service and welfare of their communities and to the surviving families who must ever suffer those inconsolable losses. As the President and Congress shake out the protocols of building a new relationship with a regime that appears to remain steadfast in its beliefs and practices even in the face of U.S. conciliation, we ask them to remember that the blue lives cut short by those who remain safely harbored by this regime still matter here to the hundreds of thousands of police officers who uphold their legacy.”

Photo: New Jersey State Police website