“I considered myself a foot soldier out there with the troops, where I could make a contribution to the black liberation movement,” he told a New York Times reporter in 1996. “I was at war, as strange as that may sound to some people now, with an enemy, which was the United States government, and the skyjacking was a continuation of that struggle.”

Before joining the Panthers, Brent’s life was devoid of direction. Born in Franklin, La., on Nov. 10, 1930, Brent and his family eventually settled in Oakland. At the age of 17 Brent enlisted in the Army using a fake birth certificate. Eight months later the ruse was uncovered and he was discharged.

As an adult, Brent worked as a short-order cook and a dishwasher and served time in prison for robbery. He was 37 when he heard the Panthers speak at a rally and “the audacity of these young Blacks so excited me and stirred emotions I thought had died years ago,” he wrote.

They framed the world for Brent and inspired him. When white people asked him what he and others in the party wanted, he had a simple answer.

“I always told them we wanted the same things they did … honorable, rewarding work; a decent place to live; adequate health care and education for all black people; justice in the courts; non-brutal police who didn’t abuse their power; and a government respectful of all people regardless of race or creed.”

Brent conducted the hijacking of New York-bound TWA Flight 154 alone, and none of the 76 passengers was injured.

In Cuba, Brent was not greeted with open arms; authorities sent him to prison. Rumors circulated that Brent was a government agent.

For 22 months Brent served hard time in a Cuban prison. Those were difficult times too for his sister, Elouise Rawlins, who lived in Oakland; Brent was her only sibling.

“I hated to think that it was possible I would never see him again

When Brent was released from prison he worked in sugar cane fields, on a pig farm, as a radio disc jockey and as a high school teacher. He earned a degree in Spanish literature and married writer Jane McManus, a fellow radical. He sometimes met with visiting foreigners and journalists, including Wasserman.

“I always knew whatever else might be said about Bill Brent, you could always rely on him to tell you the truth, and he would tell you the truth, no matter how painful, about the reality of the Cuban revolution,” said Wasserman, former book editor of The Times.

“It was really very moving,” Wasserman said. “I have to say he was a changed man by having imposed a narrative coherence on what was an often tormented and embittered life.”

The Washington Post called the autobiography “honest and sometimes as exciting as a thriller.”

The book brought Brent media attention, including producers from a major television network’s news magazine. Plans for the segment were nixed, but not before the crew filmed Brent in Cuba, then visited Rawlins and her family in Oakland.

Nieces and nephews gathered around a TV to watch video of the uncle they had never met. Then the producer filmed the family speaking to Brent. One tearful message came from a great-niece.

“She told him she wished she could have met him in person; that she believed that he was truly trying to improve things for black people and that she was proud of him,” Rawlins said.

Later, back in Cuba, Brent watched.

“He broke down and wept,” Wasserman said. “It was as if his life, through all the pain and exile, counted for something.”

Related…

Havana Journal;25 Years an Exile: An Old Black Panther Sums Up

HAVANA— More than a quarter of a century after he sought political asylum in Cuba, William Lee Brent still seems American to the core. He speaks a Spanish tinged with the Louisiana accent of his boyhood, prefers whisky to rum, and continues to focus his attention on many of the same causes he once espoused as a member of the Black Panther Party.

But Mr. Brent has cast his lot with the Cuban revolution, and even if he wanted to, he could not return to the land of his birth. He arrived here in 1969 after hijacking an airliner bound for New York from San Francisco with 76 people on board, and after all these years he remains a fugitive from American justice.

Now, at the age of 66, Mr. Brent has written an autobiography, “Long Time Gone: A Black Panther’s True-Life Story of His Hijacking and 25 Years in Cuba” (Times Books, a subsidiary of Random House). In it, he recalls growing up poor in the South, the years he spent in San Quentin prison on an armed robbery conviction, his career as a political activist in Oakland and the ups and downs of his life in Cuba — but expresses no remorse for the act that first brought him here.

“I considered myself a foot soldier, out there with the troops, where I could make a contribution to the black liberation movement,” Mr. Brent said during an interview here. “I was at war, as strange as that may sound to some people now, with an enemy, which was the United States Government, and the skyjacking was a continuation of that struggle.”

If Mr. Brent has any regrets, they stem from his isolation from his mother and sister, who have never come to visit him, and his inability to fully “feel the pulse of what’s going on in the black community anymore.” In retrospect, he views his association with the Black Panthers as the highlight of his life, and refers frequently to party leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale both in the book and in conversation.

By his own admission, Mr. Brent squandered the first half of his life on petty crime, which rewarded him with nothing more than an intimate knowledge of the American prison system and a bitterness that corroded his soul. Joining the Black Panthers, he said, plunged him into “a vital, effervescent, crazy, wonderful period of time” that gave him direction, purpose, pride and, above all, a political education.

“The Panthers were a street gang, but one that was highly politicized and conscious,” Mr. Brent said when asked about several recent revisionist books that portray the group as basically criminal in intent. “It was a street gang with a political agenda directed toward bettering the black community. Instead of dealing dope and getting rich, they did what they were supposed to do.”

But when Mr. Brent first arrived here, he found to his shock that the Cuban state security apparatus regarded him with the same suspicion as the American authorities. Instead of being hailed as a hero, he was tossed into jail for 22 months, where he struggled to convince his captors “I am a revolutionary” and not a C.I.A. agent. He was then sent to “hijack house,” a halfway home full of renegade Americans unhappy to learn that the Cuban revolution had no use for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

Prison in the United States “is not as hard as here,” Mr. Brent said when asked to compare his eight years in San Quentin and Tehachapi with his time in an isolation cell on the outskirts of Havana. “Here they don’t allow you to do anything but hard time.”

Since his release, Mr. Brent has done a bit of everything: cut sugar cane and raised pigs, worked in a soap factory, taught English to high-school students and been a disk jockey and announcer on Radio Havana. “I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, because they taught me how to love work, instead of hating it and having to struggle to find a job,” he said.

Mr. Brent now lives with his wife, Jane McManus, a fellow American radical who first visited Cuba in the 1960’s, in a comfortable apartment with a view of the Almendares River and a tree-studded park. His neighbors may be Cuban, but the records in his music collection are jazz and blues. He uses a computer to stay abreast of “the movement,” as he still calls it, and its crusades, attested to by a prominently displayed poster calling for freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a radio journalist convicted of killing a police officer in Philadelphia in 1981 in a case that has drawn widespread protests.

“Here I have basically learned that I was an American,” he said, idly petting a pair of longhaired dachshunds as they wandered by. “I had never considered myself an American before, but you can’t get rid of what you are, what you grew up in, the way you were formed.”

To promote his autobiography, Mr. Brent has taken part in several radio telephone call-in programs from the United States, and also recently held a book party at his residence here. That event drew a mixed crowd of American and Canadian expatriate leftists and prominent Cuban intellectuals.

BLACK PANTHERS 4/19 NOV 68 – WILLIAM LEE BRENT, WILFRED HOLIDAY, SAMUEL NAPIER, RICHARD E. BROWN, JOHN BOWMAN, RAYMAN LEWIS of the Black Panther. Photo Joe Rosenhal

“This is a remarkable book filled with authenticity and sincerity, with strong images of Bill’s childhood,” Victor Casaus, a Cuban writer, told the gathering. “It demonstrates the author’s need to settle accounts, including with some demons from his own past.”

But recent years have also been unsettling, Mr. Brent said, and a challenge to his beliefs. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the mounting economic privations that have followed here, he said, “the people who worked and sacrificed everything” have become disillusioned and the Government “has had to struggle to preserve some of the social gains that had been made.”

“Cuban society is more and more dependent on outside forces” from the world of capitalism, Mr. Brent lamented. “People have discovered that not all Cubans are in agreement with the revolution, that they want some things the revolution taught them were bad, like Big Macs and Nikes.”

Nevertheless, his own faith that socialism is the best path for humanity remains unshaken, he said. So is his conviction that he must never abandon his struggle against “the system” he still believes forced him here, even if it means he never sets foot in the United States again.

“I’ve been running all my life, fleeing one thing or another, looking for this, trying to find that,” he said. “I’ve been on a flight from depression, oppression, racism, injustice, inhumanity, cruelty. That flight is not over, but I’m not just running from it. I’m fighting it.”

By LARRY ROHTER

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/09/world/havana-journal-25-years-an-exile-an-old-black-panther-sums-up.html