How I hijacked a plane and spent the next 44 years living in Cuba
DURING THE 1960S AND EARLY ‘70S, dozens of American citizens hijacked commercial airliners and took them to Cuba. Most of them were young radicals of one stripe or another; many were black nationalists. Before Washington and Havana signed the Anti-Air Piracy Act of 1973 in a joint attempt to stop an almost comical flow of airplanes south, many of the "skyjackers," as they were called at the time, received asylum from Castro’s Cuba upon landing. One of these men was Charlie Hill, a 22-year-old revolutionary with a group called the Republic of New Afrika. Hill arrived in Havana by way of an unscheduled stop on a TWA plane in November 1971, punctuating an unlikely escape from a statewide manhunt in New Mexico. Then and still the subject of a warrant for the murder of a New Mexico police officer, Hill is among the last remaining refugees from last century’s high tide of skyjacking. He is now 67 years old and beginning to go frail. He receives a Cuban pension of 200 pesos ($10) a month, which isn’t enough to live on, and supplements it with occasional tour guide work.
This autumn, while working in Havana, I met him through his lawyer, a Denver-based civil rights attorney named Jason Flores-Williams, and I got to know him well over hours spent talking about his life in the US, Vietnam, and Cuba. These conversations usually sprawled over plates of chicken and yellow rice, followed by harsh Cuban cigarettes and beer.
Since the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, calls for Hill’s extradition have been growing. And while Cuba has repeatedly said that the radical refugees are off the negotiating table, Hill feels his future is more uncertain than at any time since his arrival on the island. "I don’t go near the new US embassy," he says. "That’s US soil."
Hill still considers himself a revolutionary. But like most Cubans, most of his energy is by necessity channeled into surviving in a rapidly changing Cuba. Here’s his life, in his own words:
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