U.S. hands off Assata Shakur!

Across the world, progressive people stand in solidarity with Assata Shakur. This revolutionary, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, was shot twice by New Jersey police officers in 1973, and then sent to prison for the death of one of the officers.

When she escaped prison six years later, the revolutionary government of Cuba opened its arms and offered her asylum.

Now the U.S. Department of Justice has raised the bounty on Shakur to $1 million. Just as it has done to socialist Cuba, where imperialism suffered a defeat that it hasn’t been able to reverse, the United States wants to punish Shakur—whose first name means “she who struggles”—for daring to struggle and daring to win.

A number of Black organizations and other progressives are understandably outraged with this announcement and see it as an attack on the struggle of Black and other oppressed peoples to the right of self-determination.

Just like Cuba’s embodiment of a socialist future, Shakur embodies the heroic struggle for Black liberation from racist repression that the United States has tried to silence for so long. Both Cuba and Shakur have survived, and workers and oppressed everywhere are emboldened by their example. To the United States, and imperialism as a whole, there is no greater crime.

As the imperialists watch resistance movements grow worldwide, coupled with growing resistance to repression and oppression at home, it becomes all the more important to them that workers not hear voices of hope. This is why Washington has recently increased travel restrictions to Cuba. And this is why it has raised the bounty on Shakur by $850,000.

Meanwhile, the United States ruling class brings death, destruction and misery to working and oppressed peoples around the world. If anyone should have a bounty on their head, it’s the top echelons of the U.S. government, for their crimes against humanity around the world.