Joanne Chesimard
on the Next Flight to Newark, New Jersey
Assata Shakur
Cuba is still getting a ruthless political beat down from the United States
for daring to point ICBMs at the US in 1962 and spending troops to free Africans
in Angola and South Africa. Cuba is now being punished for training a new
Venezuela defense force and leading the fight against the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Washington fears the political leadership of Cuba taking hold in South America.
Like Haiti the first free African American state before it, Cuban and other
Black Caribbean islands have been a critical source of imported cheap African
labor to North America as Black North Americans moved out the Deep South into
the Northern factories.
Since the collapse of Central American manufacturing, caused by the ruthless
North American Free Trade slave labor, tide waves of Latin Americans have been
welcomed into North America by multinationals looking for even cheap labor. For
a Central American worker living on a dollar a day, four dollars an hour under
the table is big money. He does not see his work as slave labor.
The Latin population passed the Black populations as the largest minority in New
Jersey. Many of the Latin immigrants flooding the inner cities are being driven
north to the US by the economic collapse of their national economy caused by the
consequences of the NAFTA.
US multinationals are driving local Central American manufacturers out of
business; their workers are forced to states like New Jersey to work for next to
anything. With urban youth unemployment over 90 percent, high school dropped
rates over 50 percent and an institutionalized drug culture, the relationship
with law enforcement will remain seriously challenged at best. Foreign
immigrants are being used as slave labor by local businesses to cannibalized
youth employment.
The African American community and the New Jersey State Police and other local
law enforcement agencies have worked to build a system of communication over
last 30 years that in theory should reduce the likelihood that the scenario that
led to the confrontation between Assata Shakur, formerly know as Joanne
Chesimard and the New Jersey State Police. The
reality is that Blacks and Latinos still are mostly to be profiled, stopped,
arrested and end up in armed conflict with the police. Local courts and
forensics science has evolved, but most Blacks and Latinos are forced to entire
a plea bargain.
Homeland security and the new FBI are not the old COINTELPRO trying to
destabilize the Black movement and African American leaders. Forensics evidence
is now a science and juries new found respect for forensics experts. In the
1970’s, Black revolutionaries were struggling for political freedom. Today,
Black people struggle for their existence.
If Shakur’s return to New Jersey would create the basis for Cuba to get the same
type of industrial relations that China enjoys with the US, she would be on the
next flight to Newark, New Jersey. Any one who suggests good political
relationships between the US and Cuba would change from just this personal act
by Ms. Shakur knows little history and is a political opportunist. Neither is
that person not very concerned about either Latin policies or the fragile but
critical communications between the Black/Latin communities and law enforcement.
However fragile and dysfunctional elements within this communication network may
be, appeasers sometimes act as if it is not working. But on the whole it is
functioning. Many lives, Black, Latin and white have been invested by the Black
community and law enforcement in building a new relationship.
This is one of many reasons no one should ever knowingly politicize this
relationship, much less hold it hostage to a private or group centric agenda.
The Cuban US relationship is already being held hostage to the Bush
administration in Washington and the state of Florida and sugar special
interests. Its serves no useful good of the people of Trenton or New of Jersey
to base the whole of its Caribbean and Latin America policy to the return of
Shakur. No more than US/ Saudi policy is based on turning over Ben Laden before
we buy Saudi oil.
The economic and political situation in the inner city is far worse in 2005,
than it was in 1973. The Black and Latino resistance infrastructure is
weakening. US debit is projected at 900 billion dollars in 2005. Last month the
economy only created 78,000 new jobs, reportedly the country needs 350, 000 new
jobs per month just to maintain today’s living standard.
Youth unemployment in the inner city is 93 percent. This economic reality is
putting a dangerous stress on the fragile communications between the inner city.
The Black and Latin skilled workforce in North American is not able to reproduce
itself either in education or skill level. The major cities in New Jersey rank
at the very bottom in education and skill training.
There are many threats to Black and Latin American communities, new and old that
we must remain on guard for. One of the growing threats is a increasing number
of Black leaders who hide behind law and political posturing rather than
confronting the political realities and challenges of the rising Latin American
political economy in there own cities. The African American understanding of the
real Cuba situation is the portal to a basic understanding of Central and South
American policies.
Many of the Cubans in North American came because rather than develop massive
industrial trade with Cuban, like US trade with China, the official US trade
policy toward Cuba has been to slowly starve and destroy the Cuban economy by
limiting Cuban trade with the free world.
Cuba is being punished for declaring freedom from US General Food corporation,
which controlled most of the sugar plantations on the island and the Caribbean.
While Russia, China and other Communist countries get ten of billion of American
aid, while still pointing ICBMs at the US!
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