Washington, D.C. –
Marion S. Barry Jr., the recovering drug addict who is mayor of the nation’s capital, is supposed to return to his post later this week after grappling with the “telltale signs of spiritual relapse and physical exhaustion” in a St. Louis clinic. Barry grandly titled his getaway “Rejuvenation!!” and suggested that he needed to lift his nose from the grindstone to keep it from falling onto the coke
mirror. Hizzoner later denied he was using anything stronger than
cigarettes, but he has been under a lot of stress lately. Even his closest friends, like boxing promoter Rock Newman, hinted broadly that a relapse had occurred.
Barry has looked somewhat green around the gills, both physically and politically, for several months. President Clinton last year installed a Control Board in the district, stripping the mayor of spending power, and lenders have been dubious, to say the least, about financing the city’s $650 million deficit. In January, shortly after Barry emerged from prostate surgery, the Blizzard of ’96 caught the city with two-thirds of its snowplows out for repairs, leaving streets blocked and iced over for weeks.
With winter turning to spring, and potholes rattling the axles on Embassy Row, Barry talked about a “transformation” of the city, which, among other things, entailed laying off 10,000 workers from the giant bureaucracy Barry himself had built over the years. So far he hasn’t released a detailed plan. His staff did, however, awake members of the press with 2 a.m. phone calls last week, directing them to an airport news conference, where Barry told them he was leaving his Maryland retreat for a St. Louis treatment center. Why? So he wouldn’t be hounded by the press.
All this comes just 18 months after Barry swept back into office, swathed in kinte cloth and penitence for his videotaped 1990 crack bust in a D.C. hotel, where the feds employed a former girlfriend as bait. (“The bitch set me up!”) With this colorful record, it wouldn’t seem like the wisest career move to engage in a public bout of demon-wrestling. But Barry’s teflon is lot thicker than the coating on your average public official. He looks like a shoo-in for reelection in 1998 as Mayor-for-Life of a city where the potholes are bigger, the white and black middle-class flight faster, the water dirtier, the schools more chaotic, the dope and alcohol addicts more numerous –80,000 out of a population of 550,000, according to the city’s substance abuse administration — than just about anywhere else.
Why would the local electorate reward a man with so few apparent achievements? “They know I care,” Barry said after being returned to City Council in 1992, fresh out of jail. “I understand them better than anybody else in elected office.”
For a time, Barry looked good. In his early years as mayor, he wined and dined contractors, resulting in a downtown development boom in the 1980s. The good times, however, merely masked the disastrous underlying financial structure Congress had saddled on D.C. Unlike other cities, the district pays for its prisons, Medicaid, welfare, a university and other services that states normally handle. And two-thirds of the income earned in D.C. rides to its home in the suburbs every evening — often aboard the safe, efficient, D.C.-administered subway system. When the bubble burst in the ’90s, the district was staring at a huge budget deficit, which the GOP overseers simply handed over to number crunchers. It was enough to drive any mayor to drink.
“Barry’s biggest skills were in political life, the wheeling and dealing to get development in the city,” says Bernard H. Ross, chair of public administration department at American University. “With the Control Board in charge it cuts down his options, and a political player without options is wounded.”
Today, Barry seems tentative and increasingly steered
by his wife Cora Masters Barry, who has a Nancy Reaganesque
reputation in the city administration. (Loose Lips, the anonymous
columnist in the rambunctious weekly City Paper, calls her Lady
MacBarry.) The substance abuse treatment community is watching the mayor’s latest struggle with sympathy, although some thought he’d be better off resigning. “I really wonder whether a person in
recovery can be mayor of a major city,” says Marsh Ward,
clinical director of Clean & Sober Streets clinic. “The
political process is counterproductive to recovery, you know –
because recovery is based on honesty.”
The political process has not been kind to other D.C. addicts, either. Most methadone and in-patient drug recovery programs in Washington have been shut down by Congressional cutbacks. About 100 addicts slept in the alley outside Clean & Sober one night last week so they could be first in the door the next morning: the private clinic is one of the only places left in town for the poor to get the cure.
Barry’s absence, meanwhile, may provide a chance for officials to start getting the city’s finances back in order. City Administrator
Michael C. Rogers used Barry’s absence to strip the Department of Human Services of the power to authorize contracts within its $1.6 billion budget.
At city hall, politicos were laying bets on the likelihood Barry would return. “He should be given privacy to heal his soul,”
said City Council chairman David A. Clarke. “Welcome to
Washington, psychodrama on the Potomac,” responded Harry Jaffe of
Washingtonian magazine. “See the monuments! Feel our pain!”
Arthur Allen is Washington D.C.-based journalist whose articles have appeared in the Village Voice and the New Republic.
“Oops, we killed him!”
Now prison officials have a name for restraint that gets out of hand
By Richard R. Korn, Terry A. Kupers and Corey Weinstein
If you’re overweight, on drugs or easily excitable,
getting arrested could be particularly hazardous to your health. You may be at risk of incurring “Sudden In Custody Death Syndrome” — a term newly minted by corrections officials for “Oops, we killed him!”
Thirty-three prisoners in California are officially listed as having died from the syndrome following the application of “standard restraint techniques,” applied on inmates involved in situations that are judged potentially violent.
One of those deaths was caught on a 25-minute videotape, shot on July 25, 1995 in a Santa Clara County, Calif., jail and recently leaked to prison reform advocates by a prison source who insists on anonymity. The video, whose authenticity has been confirmed by county prison officials, recorded California correctional officials carrying out a routine procedure for transporting people under restraint. The videographer didn’t know that the events he was taping would end in death.
The inmate, Joseph Leitner, who suffered severe and long-standing mental illness complicated by drug abuse, had been jailed on “outstanding warrants.” He had informed the intake social worker that he was under county mental health care and that, when anxious, he tended to slap his own face. The social worker ordered that he be restrained and taken to a safety cell in the jail’s psychiatric unit.
The video shows an unresisting Leitner being forced onto the floor face down by five guards and put into a double hammer-lock position. He cries out in pain. He is stripped naked. He injures his lip and begins bleeding from the mouth. The guards throw a blanket over his head and twist it at the neck, apparently fearful of coming into contact with the blood. Then with Leitner’s body still in a double hammer-lock, the guards pull up on his arms and legs and carry him “suitcase” style to the psych unit. He bucks a few times.
Once at the unit, the officers heave Leitner, still in manacles, onto a
bed. Almost five minutes elapse before they return to check on him and discover he has stopped breathing. They apply CPR but he never regains consciousness.
The official cause of Leitner’s brain death, Sudden In Custody Death Syndrome, is also cited as the cause of death for 32 other people who died in custody in California, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The term is increasingly used in cases where jail inmates or arrestees perish after being placed in restraints. Those at highest risk for the syndrome have, typically: just engaged in violent struggle; failed to respond to pain compliance controls; are handcuffed while in a prone position with their faces down; intoxicated, overweight or over 50; or have been silent for an extended period. The restraint techniques typically involve rough physical handling (such as “suitcasing”) and/or the use of pepper spray.
Manufacturers of pepper spray recommend that persons sprayed with the substance be exposed to fresh air and not placed face down or left in a small, confined space such as a police van or jail cell. Nevertheless official procedure throughout California often involves spraying into a prison cell or chaining an inmate who has been exposed to pepper spray.
The Leitner video, say prison reform advocates, raises the possibility that comparable physical excesses may have been employed during some of the other incidents of Sudden In Custody Death Syndrome in California.
Others warn that as long as Sudden In Custody Death Syndrome remains on the books, overworked and often undertrained staff will have no incentive to apply alternative procedures — such as on-the-spot psychological counseling or having a jail nurse apply tranquilizers. Instead, they will continue to use restraint techniques designed to protect them at any cost.
Richard R. Korn is a former corrections administrator and professor of criminology; Terry A. Kupers, M.D., is a forensic psychiatric consultant; and Corey Weinstein is a medical doctor who works with the Pelican Bay Information Project.
)
Pacific News Service
Quote of the day
One strike and you’re out
“The underlying assumption of this bill is that once you have committed one crime of this kind, you are presumed guilty for the rest of your life. That, my friends, is contrary, whether we like it or not, to the constitutional mandates that govern our nation.We should not be presuming people guilty.”
– Rep. Melvin L. Watt, D-N.C., the only congressman to speak against a House bill mandating states to notify localities when convicted sex offenders settle in their communities.
In a cozy, ramshackle apartment in what used to be the
swanky part of Havana, a senior citizen of the black liberation
movement waits out an exile linked irrevocably to the fate of
Fidel Castro. William Lee Brent, 65-year-old Black Panther and
air pirate, is a retiree in Communist Cuba. He has a salt-and-
pepper goatee and a swashbuckling gold earring, with gray stubble
fighting a comeback on his shaved head. While his longhaired
dachshunds Jason and Rufus yip and waddle about, pausing in their
frantic rounds to make a mess on the balcony, Brent sits
shirtless on his rattan couch looking out at the banyon trees in
the park across the street. John Coltrane’s “Gentle Side” plays
on the CD player. Down on Quinta Avenida Cubans wheel by on their
Chinese-made bicycles, too broke to buy gas in this forlorn but
defiant outpost of the fallen Soviet empire. Out past the park
lie the beach and the open sea, deep and tantalizing in its
infinite blue reach toward the Florida Keys, 90 miles away.
Twenty-seven years ago, Brent shot and wounded three San
Francisco police officers in a gunbattle outside the Hall of
Justice. Rather than face the California justice system, Brent
hopped bail and hijacked a plane to Cuba on June 17, 1969.
The shootout followed a surreal, almost farcical episode at a gas station. Brent and other Panthers had pulled their van into the station to gas up. When Brent opened his jacket to pay, the attendant saw a gun in Brent’s waistband, assumed he was being robbed and shoved wads of money at him. High on beer and dexedrine, Brent simply took the money, filled up the van’s tank and drove off. The other Panthers weren’t even aware of what had gone down until the police started to chase them.
The pictures still play in Brent’s mind: the cops running
toward his parked van as he crouched and took aim, the cops 20
yards away with drawn guns, the strange sense of calm as he
squeezed the trigger — squeeze, don’t pull.
“I have no
regrets,” he says. “I was a soldier at war. I carried a gun
because I intended to use it, in my defense or the defense of
anyone who was in danger of abuse by the Oakland or San Francisco
police. It was nothing in those days for the cops to shoot a
Black Panther and claim he was resisting arrest. I have no doubt
that if I hadn’t gotten them, they’d have gotten me.”
That gunbattle marked the turning point of a rough voyage that took Brent from a poor Louisiana boyhood to exile in Havana’s Miramar district. Along the way,
as he relates in his vivid new memoir, “Long Time Gone” (Times
Books) Brent was a petty grifter and b&e man in
Oakland, an army grunt, a prison inmate in California and Cuba, a
soldier in the extravagant, marijuana-smoked world of Panther
politics, and a bridge between stranded skyjackers and leftie
fellow travelers in the American expatriate community of Cuba.
Through all this he has remained a lone wolf idealist, burned by
experience but still searching for a leader in the fight for black dignity.
I met Brent in late March, a few weeks after Fidel
Castro blew two Cuban exile planes out of the sky Feb. 24 in a
show of cojones that provoked President Clinton to sign draconian
new anti-Cuban legislation. The Helms-Burton bill signed by the
president is aimed at paralyzing all trade with Cuba until a
government takes office that is to the liking of Sen. Jesse Helms, assuming
Helms is still alive — Castro has a way of outlasting his enemies.
Among the bill’s many
conditions for lifting the U.S. embargo on Cuba are the ouster of
Fidel and his brother Raul from the government, and the
extradition of fugitives to America. At the U.S. Interest
Section, a scaffolded enclave in central Havana’s Vedado section,
officials have a list of 77 fugitives who are believed to be living in Cuba.
Brent is No. 10 on the list, which includes 68 air pirates as
well as fraudulent businessman and Nixon friend Robert Vesco and Frank
Terpil, CIA man gone bad, like Conrad’s Kurtz, beyond all reasonable
constraint.
On the one hand, the bill might be seen as a blessing
for Brent, because it strips Castro of any incentive for
returning the fugitives in a deal with Washington. On the other
hand, it ties his fate forever to a socialist idyll that soured
for Brent long ago. And he’s not convinced Fidel wouldn’t try to
sell him down the river anyway.
“Hey, politics are politics,” Brent says. “If he thinks
he can get some advantage out of peddling us to the Americans,
he’ll do it.”
When Brent, accompanied by an English-speaking Interior
Ministry official, walked off TWA Flight 154 from Oakland Airport onto Cuban soil (he used a .38 special to hijack the plane in that pre-metal detector age), he thought he had arrived in a socialist land of upright men in the mold of Che Guevara. His first discouraging
experience came soon after he landed. Rather than being received with open arms as a revolutionary, Brent spent two years in a series of foul-
smelling prison cells. Castro’s government viewed many hijackers with intense suspicion, suspecting they might be double agents or undesirable criminals. When he got out, the comrades lodged him in
“Hijack House,” a home for wayward Americans who were fed, watered
and clothed under the watchful eye of the government.
Brent worked hard to convince the Cubans
he was a dues-paying revolutionary. He proudly cut miles of sugar
cane, carted cement at a pig farm, studied Spanish and taught
English, and worked as a journalist at Radio Havana. At moments he felt he belonged in the Cuban revolution, but the pettiness and arbitrary dictates of the
top-down revolution got on his nerves. Still, “in spite of my
great disappointment at the course the Cuban revolution has
taken,” he writes, “I have not lost my resolve or my dedication
to the struggle of my people and the cause of justice and
equality for all.”
Today, Brent and his wife of 23 years, journalist and fellow radical Jane
McManus, make a living doing odd translating and
teaching jobs. Brent, born a Baptist, frequents a babalao — an Afro-Cuban
priest whose religion
stresses the spirit that lies in things of the earth.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the disappearance
of its $8 billion in annual subsidies, Cubans are suddenly hustling
to survive in a society where nearly everything is charged in
dollars and the average monthly salary is $10. Brent is not
sure if the system can survive the
crisis. “Cubans have been taught what to think, how to think and
why to think. They’ve been taught to get in line and march,” he
says. “But Fidel has educated so many people that he has
difficulty getting them in line. The youth of Cuba support the
revolution, but they want change. There are too many old men at
the top and young people at the bottom.”
In 1993, with his nation’s socialist economy in tatters, Fidel and his old comrades in arms began a series of grudging reforms. After being told
how to think for years, people were invited to learn how to get
by for themselves. 200,000 Cubans were laid off from state jobs; many started their own tiny businesses. Scholars were urged
to dream up new economic models to keep the Cuban
Revolution afloat. But the period of openness, in which everyday
Cubans were apparently allowed to speak their minds as never before, didn’t fool
Brent. “They give you the green light and you give gas, give
gas, but you keep your foot close to the brake pedal cuz down the
road you know a red light’s gonna pop up and — eeeerk — you gotta
jump on the brakes.”
Sure enough, Fidel jammed on the brakes in late March. The
Helms-Burton law provided the pretext to claim that the
Revolution was under attack. In the first meeting of the
Communist Party Central Committee in four years, the leadership
charged that a “Trojan horse” of imperialist “fifth
columnists” had infiltrated the Cuban media and research
centers. Scholars who had been publishing books and articles
pushing more liberalization, under the mistaken belief that the
Revolution supported them, have abruptly been told their thoughts
are no longer wanted. Exchange programs with U.S.
scholars have been cancelled. The Big Chill has returned.
Jane, who has lived in Cuba even longer than Brent, is even
more glum about the Revolution’s prospects. “Revolutionary
idealism died a long time ago,” she says. Cuba is simply her home, she
says. She likes her life with Bill, her friends and her dogs.
Unlike Brent, she returns to New York for a three- or four-
week visit every year. Brent would like to return to the states.
He wants to see his 81-year-old mother, to spend time with his
sister Ella and her children. He says that Cuban blacks lack a sense of
identity as blacks and continue to face discrimination — something he feels every time he walks into certain buildings
with Jane, who is white, at his side. “They wave me right in
and they ask him for his ID,” Jane says.
Although he acknowledges that the gun-toting Panthers introduced additional violence into the black community, Brent feels their struggle was justified. No fan of
Farrakhan, he admired the organization of the Million Man March
and asks, “what would the system have done if those million –
or 400,000 or whatever it was — brothers had arms in their
hands?” He itches for the street buzz back in Oakland. “I miss
the rhythms and emotions of the black American liberation
struggle.”
But the rhythms have changed, grown crazy at times, and Brent is not the only Panther to have strayed off the shining path of the ’60s. Bobby Seale, whom Brent served as a bodyguard, is a
lecturer and barbecue chef in Philadelphia. Huey Newton, who
lived on the lam in Cuba from 1974-77, ended up on the streets of West Oakland, where he died in a soured crack deal in 1989. Of Brent’s early compatriots from Hijack House, one has
become a babalao, another a disc jockey. Joanne Chesimard, a
former Black Liberation Army militant who came to Cuba after
breaking out of a New Jersey prison, assumed the name Assata
Shakur and is writing her second book. Other hijackers have
gone back to America, served several years in prison and returned
to normal life. But Brent is too old to contemplate going back to
prison, even briefly.
The last few years have witnessed a growing
revival of interest in the Black Panthers, reflected in several
new Panther biographies and Mario van Peebles’ film “Panther.”
But for Brent, there’ll be no book tour. “I still consider the
U.S. government the enemy. I’ve seen nothing to change my opinion
of why I took up the struggle in 1968,” he says. “And so I
doubt that I will ever go back.”
In a cozy, ramshackle apartment in what used to be the
swanky part of Havana, a senior citizen of the black liberation
movement waits out an exile linked irrevocably to the fate of
Fidel Castro. William Lee Brent, 65-year-old Black Panther and
air pirate, is a retiree in Communist Cuba. He has a salt-and-
pepper goatee and a swashbuckling gold earring, with gray stubble
fighting a comeback on his shaved head. While his longhaired
dachshunds Jason and Rufus yip and waddle about, pausing in their
frantic rounds to make a mess on the balcony, Brent sits
shirtless on his rattan couch looking out at the banyon trees in
the park across the street. John Coltrane’s “Gentle Side” plays
on the CD player. Down on Quinta Avenida Cubans wheel by on their
Chinese-made bicycles, too broke to buy gas in this forlorn but
defiant outpost of the fallen Soviet empire. Out past the park
lie the beach and the open sea, deep and tantalizing in its
infinite blue reach toward the Florida Keys, 90 miles away.
Twenty-seven years ago, Brent shot and wounded three San
Francisco police officers in a gunbattle outside the Hall of
Justice. Rather than face the California justice system, Brent
hopped bail and hijacked a plane to Cuba on June 17, 1969.
The shootout followed a surreal, almost farcical episode at a gas station. Brent and other Panthers had pulled their van into the station to gas up. When Brent opened his jacket to pay, the attendant saw a gun in Brent’s waistband, assumed he was being robbed and shoved wads of money at him. High on beer and dexedrine, Brent simply took the money, filled up the van’s tank and drove off. The other Panthers weren’t even aware of what had gone down until the police started to chase them.
The pictures still play in Brent’s mind: the cops running
toward his parked van as he crouched and took aim, the cops 20
yards away with drawn guns, the strange sense of calm as he
squeezed the trigger — squeeze, don’t pull.
“I have no
regrets,” he says. “I was a soldier at war. I carried a gun
because I intended to use it, in my defense or the defense of
anyone who was in danger of abuse by the Oakland or San Francisco
police. It was nothing in those days for the cops to shoot a
Black Panther and claim he was resisting arrest. I have no doubt
that if I hadn’t gotten them, they’d have gotten me.”
That gunbattle marked the turning point of a rough voyage that took Brent from a poor Louisiana boyhood to exile in Havana’s Miramar district. Along the way,
as he relates in his vivid new memoir, “Long Time Gone” (Times
Books) Brent was a petty grifter and b&e man in
Oakland, an army grunt, a prison inmate in California and Cuba, a
soldier in the extravagant, marijuana-smoked world of Panther
politics, and a bridge between stranded skyjackers and leftie
fellow travelers in the American expatriate community of Cuba.
Through all this he has remained a lone wolf idealist, burned by
experience but still searching for a leader in the fight for black dignity.
I met Brent in late March, a few weeks after Fidel
Castro blew two Cuban exile planes out of the sky Feb. 24 in a
show of cojones that provoked President Clinton to sign draconian
new anti-Cuban legislation. The Helms-Burton bill signed by the
president is aimed at paralyzing all trade with Cuba until a
government takes office that is to the liking of Sen. Jesse Helms, assuming
Helms is still alive — Castro has a way of outlasting his enemies.
Among the bill’s many
conditions for lifting the U.S. embargo on Cuba are the ouster of
Fidel and his brother Raul from the government, and the
extradition of fugitives to America. At the U.S. Interest
Section, a scaffolded enclave in central Havana’s Vedado section,
officials have a list of 77 fugitives who are believed to be living in Cuba.
Brent is No. 10 on the list, which includes 68 air pirates as
well as fraudulent businessman and Nixon friend Robert Vesco and Frank
Terpil, CIA man gone bad, like Conrad’s Kurtz, beyond all reasonable
constraint.
On the one hand, the bill might be seen as a blessing
for Brent, because it strips Castro of any incentive for
returning the fugitives in a deal with Washington. On the other
hand, it ties his fate forever to a socialist idyll that soured
for Brent long ago. And he’s not convinced Fidel wouldn’t try to
sell him down the river anyway.
“Hey, politics are politics,” Brent says. “If he thinks
he can get some advantage out of peddling us to the Americans,
he’ll do it.”
When Brent, accompanied by an English-speaking Interior
Ministry official, walked off TWA Flight 154 from Oakland Airport onto Cuban soil (he used a .38 special to hijack the plane in that pre-metal detector age), he thought he had arrived in a socialist land of upright men in the mold of Che Guevara. His first discouraging
experience came soon after he landed. Rather than being received with open arms as a revolutionary, Brent spent two years in a series of foul-
smelling prison cells. Castro’s government viewed many hijackers with intense suspicion, suspecting they might be double agents or undesirable criminals. When he got out, the comrades lodged him in
“Hijack House,” a home for wayward Americans who were fed, watered
and clothed under the watchful eye of the government.
Brent worked hard to convince the Cubans
he was a dues-paying revolutionary. He proudly cut miles of sugar
cane, carted cement at a pig farm, studied Spanish and taught
English, and worked as a journalist at Radio Havana. At moments he felt he belonged in the Cuban revolution, but the pettiness and arbitrary dictates of the
top-down revolution got on his nerves. Still, “in spite of my
great disappointment at the course the Cuban revolution has
taken,” he writes, “I have not lost my resolve or my dedication
to the struggle of my people and the cause of justice and
equality for all.”
Today, Brent and his wife of 23 years, journalist and fellow radical Jane
McManus, make a living doing odd translating and
teaching jobs. Brent, born a Baptist, frequents a babalao — an Afro-Cuban
priest whose religion
stresses the spirit that lies in things of the earth.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the disappearance
of its $8 billion in annual subsidies, Cubans are suddenly hustling
to survive in a society where nearly everything is charged in
dollars and the average monthly salary is $10. Brent is not
sure if the system can survive the
crisis. “Cubans have been taught what to think, how to think and
why to think. They’ve been taught to get in line and march,” he
says. “But Fidel has educated so many people that he has
difficulty getting them in line. The youth of Cuba support the
revolution, but they want change. There are too many old men at
the top and young people at the bottom.”
In 1993, with his nation’s socialist economy in tatters, Fidel and his old comrades in arms began a series of grudging reforms. After being told
how to think for years, people were invited to learn how to get
by for themselves. 200,000 Cubans were laid off from state jobs; many started their own tiny businesses. Scholars were urged
to dream up new economic models to keep the Cuban
Revolution afloat. But the period of openness, in which everyday
Cubans were apparently allowed to speak their minds as never before, didn’t fool
Brent. “They give you the green light and you give gas, give
gas, but you keep your foot close to the brake pedal cuz down the
road you know a red light’s gonna pop up and — eeeerk — you gotta
jump on the brakes.”
Sure enough, Fidel jammed on the brakes in late March. The
Helms-Burton law provided the pretext to claim that the
Revolution was under attack. In the first meeting of the
Communist Party Central Committee in four years, the leadership
charged that a “Trojan horse” of imperialist “fifth
columnists” had infiltrated the Cuban media and research
centers. Scholars who had been publishing books and articles
pushing more liberalization, under the mistaken belief that the
Revolution supported them, have abruptly been told their thoughts
are no longer wanted. Exchange programs with U.S.
scholars have been cancelled. The Big Chill has returned.
Jane, who has lived in Cuba even longer than Brent, is even
more glum about the Revolution’s prospects. “Revolutionary
idealism died a long time ago,” she says. Cuba is simply her home, she
says. She likes her life with Bill, her friends and her dogs.
Unlike Brent, she returns to New York for a three- or four-
week visit every year. Brent would like to return to the states.
He wants to see his 81-year-old mother, to spend time with his
sister Ella and her children. He says that Cuban blacks lack a sense of
identity as blacks and continue to face discrimination — something he feels every time he walks into certain buildings
with Jane, who is white, at his side. “They wave me right in
and they ask him for his ID,” Jane says.
Although he acknowledges that the gun-toting Panthers introduced additional violence into the black community, Brent feels their struggle was justified. No fan of
Farrakhan, he admired the organization of the Million Man March
and asks, “what would the system have done if those million –
or 400,000 or whatever it was — brothers had arms in their
hands?” He itches for the street buzz back in Oakland. “I miss
the rhythms and emotions of the black American liberation
struggle.”
But the rhythms have changed, grown crazy at times, and Brent is not the only Panther to have strayed off the shining path of the ’60s. Bobby Seale, whom Brent served as a bodyguard, is a
lecturer and barbecue chef in Philadelphia. Huey Newton, who
lived on the lam in Cuba from 1974-77, ended up on the streets of West Oakland, where he died in a soured crack deal in 1989. Of Brent’s early compatriots from Hijack House, one has
become a babalao, another a disc jockey. Joanne Chesimard, a
former Black Liberation Army militant who came to Cuba after
breaking out of a New Jersey prison, assumed the name Assata
Shakur and is writing her second book. Other hijackers have
gone back to America, served several years in prison and returned
to normal life. But Brent is too old to contemplate going back to
prison, even briefly.
The last few years have witnessed a growing
revival of interest in the Black Panthers, reflected in several
new Panther biographies and Mario van Peebles’ film “Panther.”
But for Brent, there’ll be no book tour. “I still consider the
U.S. government the enemy. I’ve seen nothing to change my opinion
of why I took up the struggle in 1968,” he says. “And so I
doubt that I will ever go back.”
