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'She Died Free': Tributes Pour In for Revolutionary Icon Assata Shakur
"They wanted her bound, broken, and paraded as an example, but instead, she slipped their grip and lived out her life in exile, surrounded by people who honored her struggle and her survival," said one admirer.
Sep 27, 2025
Assata Shakur, a Black revolutionary who inspired generations of activists to struggle for a better world, passed away on Thursday in Havana, Cuba, where she had lived in exile from the US for over four decades.
Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death on Friday, saying it was caused by a combination of “health conditions and advanced age." She was reportedly 78 years old.
"At approximately 1:15 pm on September 25, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath," her daughter Kakuya Shakur wrote on Facebook on Friday. "Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time. I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time."
Shakur, who was born Joanne Deborah Byron and was also known as Joanne Deborah Chesimard, spent the first three years of her life in Queens, New York before moving to Wilmington, North Carolina. She then returned to Queens for third grade.
"Assata’s unwavering commitment to the liberation of her people continues to inspire generations."
"I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South," she recalled in a 1998 letter to Pope John Paul II. "I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression."
Shakur became active in the anti-Vietnam War, student, and Black liberation movements while attending Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York. After graduation, she joined first the Black Panther Party and then the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
"I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the US government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one," she wrote in 2013.
In 1973, she and two other BLA activists were stopped at the New Jersey Turnpike by two state troopers. By the end of the encounter, both Shakur's friend Zayd Malik Shakur and trooper Werner Foerster were shot dead. In 1977, Shakur was convicted of Foerster's murder in a trial she described as a "legal lynching." Throughout her life, she maintained her innocence.
"I was shot once with my arms held up in the air and then once again from the back," she wrote of the shootout.
She was sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years, but didn't long remain behind bars.
"In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case and who were also extremely fearful for my life," she wrote.
In 1984, she claimed asylum in Cuba. Throughout her life, she also remained staunchly committed to the cause of liberation for all oppressed peoples.
"I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the United States," she wrote to John Paul II. "I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty."
During her exile, her writings, including her 1987 autobiography, gained a wide audience and brought her story and voice to younger activists.
"It is our duty to fight for our freedom," she wrote in one of the book's most famous passages. "It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
She was also influential in the world of music and hip-hop, serving as godmother to Tupac Shakur and inspiring songs by Public Enemy and Common, among others.
The US government did not give up its pursuit of her. In 2013, under President Barack Obama, the Federal Bureau of Investigation named her the first woman on its "Most Wanted Terrorist" list. The FBI and the state of New Jersey also doubled the reward for information leading to her capture. That reward will now never be claimed.
"She died free!" one of her admirers, who uses the handle The Cake Lady, wrote on social media on Friday. "The US government, after decades of pursuit, never got the satisfaction of putting her in a cage. They wanted her bound, broken, and paraded as an example, but instead, she slipped their grip and lived out her life in exile, surrounded by people who honored her struggle and her survival."
News of her passing inspired tributes from social justice and anti-imperialist leaders and organizations, including former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)
"We honor the life of comrade Assata Shakur, a revolutionary who inspires and pushes all of us in the struggle for a better world," wrote anti-war group CodePink on social media.
Community organizer Tanisha Long posted: "Assata Shakur joins the ancestors a free woman. She did not die bound by the carceral system and she did not pass away living in a land that never respected or accepted her. Assata taught us that liberation can not be bargained for, it must be taken."
The Revolutionary Blackout Network wrote, "Thank you for fighting to liberate us all, comrade."
The New York-based People's Forum said: "We honor Assata’s life and legacy as a tireless champion of the people and as a symbol of hope and resistance for millions around the world in urgent fight against racism, police brutality, US imperialism, and white supremacy. Assata’s unwavering commitment to the liberation of her people continues to inspire generations."
The Democratic Socialists of America vowed to "honor her legacy by recognizing our duty to fight for our freedom, to win, to love, and protect one another because we have nothing to lose but our chains."
Black Lives Matter organizer Malkia Amala Cyril lamented to The Associated Press that Shakur died during a global rise of authoritarianism.
“The world in this era needs the kind of courage and radical love she practiced if we are going to survive it,” Cyril said.
Several tributes featured Shakur's own words.
"I believe in living," she wrote in a poem at the beginning of her autobiography.
"I believe in birth. I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port."
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More Countries Condemn Trump's 'Imperialist' Saber-Rattling Against Venezuela
An alliance of Latin American and Caribbean nations said Trump's military deployment poses "a threat to the stability and self-determination of all the peoples" of the region.
Aug 23, 2025
China and members of an alliance of Latin American and Caribbean nations in recent days joined countries including Brazil and Colombia and anti-war voices around the world in denouncing the Trump administration's deployment of US warships off the coast of Venezuela.
At least three US Navy guided missile destroyers and thousands of Marines are currently off the coast of Venezuela, with Pentagon officials citing President Donald Trump's January executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and his directive authorizing military force to combat narcotraffickers abroad.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that "China opposes any move that violates the purposes and principles of the [United Nations] Charter and a country's sovereignty and security."
"We oppose the use or threat of force in international relations and the interference of external forces in Venezuela's internal affairs under any pretext," she added. "We hope that the United States will do more things conducive to peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region."
Mao's remarks came on the same day that members of the 11-nation Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples' Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) issued a declaration during the group's virtual 13th Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government condemning the Trump administration's "imperialist policy of harassment and destabilization" and demanding "the immediate cessation of military threat or action" against Venezuela.
The declaration expresses support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and decries the "groundless, mythomaniacal accusations with no legal basis" against him by the Trump administration, which alleges that Maduro is one of the world's leading drug traffickers. Trump recently doubled the Biden administration's bounty on Maduro from $25 million to $50 million.
In 2020, the first Trump administration's Department of Justice charged Maduro and 14 Venezuelan officials with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine into the US, accusations the South American leader denies. The charges followed Trump's formal recognition in 2019 of an opposition coup leader as the legitimate president of Venezuela—a policy continued by the Biden administration—and the imposition of a full economic embargo on Caracas.
The ALBA-TCP declaration asserts that the Trump administration "seeks to delegitimize sovereign governments and pave the way for foreign intervention."
"These practices not only constitute a direct attack on Venezuela's independence, but also a threat to the stability and self-determination of all the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean," the alliance added.
Addressing the summit Thursday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that "Cuba firmly denounces this new demonstration of imperial force and makes a call to ALBA-TCP and from here to all the peoples of the world to condemn this irrational attack by the Trump administration," according to Venezuelanalysis.
"The issue is not only Cuba, the whole region is under threat and only with integration can we fight against that because the United States intends to define the options to subjugate us or be objects of aggression," Díaz-Canel added.
As Common Dreams reported, other Latin American leaders also condemned Trump's military deployment, with Colombian President Gustavo Petro telling his Cabinet Wednesday that "the gringos are mad if they think invading Venezuela will solve their problem" and Celso Amorim, a foreign policy adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, warning of "the risk of an escalation" and reiterating that "the principle of nonintervention is fundamental" to international order.
Although Trump has been a vocal critic of the regime change policies of past administrations—especially that of fellow Republican George W. Bush—he and members of his Cabinet have floated the idea of ousting Maduro, including via US invasion.
The United States has been meddling in Venezuela's affairs since the 19th century, citing the dubious Monroe Doctrine to assist coups, support brutal dictatorships, and pursue policies of economic strangulation in an effort to exert control over the country and its immense petroleum resources.
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'Immoral and Indefensible': Study Reveals Deadly Consequences of US Sanctions
"It is well past time that the U.S., E.U., and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism," said one of the study's authors.
Jul 23, 2025
A study published this week in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health revealed that unilateral economic sanctions cause more than 500,000 excess deaths annually, prompting renewed calls for the United States to end its use of a form of collective punishment that claims roughly as many lives as all the world's current wars combined.
The study, authored by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is the first to examine the "effects of sanctions on age-specific mortality rates in cross-country panel data using methods designed to address causal identification in observational data."
Studying the effects of sanctions on 152 countries between 1971 and 2022, the researchers "showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality," with "the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and U.S. sanctions."
"We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths," the study's authors noted, "similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict."
🚨 NEW REPORT: The myth that sanctions are a humane alternative to war is shattered. Sanctions imposed by single countries cause massive civilian deaths, with children under 5 hit hardest. bit.ly/Sanctions_Study
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— Center for Economic and Policy Research (@ceprdc.bsky.social) July 23, 2025 at 6:14 AM
Weisbrot, CEPR's co-director, said in a statement: "It is immoral and indefensible that such a lethal form of collective punishment continues to be used, let alone that it has been steadily expanded over the years. And sanctions are widely misunderstood as being a less lethal, almost nonviolent, policy alternative to military force."
The researchers found that children younger than 5 years old made up 51% of all sanctions deaths during the three-decade study period. More than three-quarters of all sanctions deaths between 1971-2022 were of children under age 15 and people over 60.
The study also noted the repeated failure of U.S. sanctions to deliver policy goals like regime change. However, such measures have caused economies to collapse, harming everyday people far more than ostensibly targeted leaders, who have the power and resources to shield themselves from the worst effects of sanctions.
"Sanctions often fail to achieve their stated objectives and instead only punish the civilian populations of the targeted countries," said Rodríguez. "It is well past time that the U.S., [European Union], and other powerful actors in the international community seriously reconsider this cruel and often counterproductive mechanism."
For six decades, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that has adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. United Nations member states have perennially—and overwhelmingly—condemned the embargo.
In Venezuela, as many as 40,000 people died in 2017-18 due to U.S. sanctions, CEPR researchers found.
Some critics have noted that civilian suffering appears to be more than an incidental cost of U.S. sanctions—it is apparently often their very intent. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—a confidant of former President John F. Kennedy—claimed that JFK sought to unleash "the terrors of the Earth" on Cuba following Fidel Castro's successful overthrow of a U.S.-backed dictatorship, because "Castro was high on his list of emotions."
While the new study "found no statistical evidence of an effect" for United Nations sanctions, Mary Smith Fawzi and Sarah Zaidi conducted research for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization that was published in The Lancet in 1995 and revealed that as many as 576,000 Iraqi children died prematurely as a result of sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council—whose sanctioning capacity was heavily influenced by the United States—to target the regime of longtime Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"Discussions in the 1990s on the effects on child mortality of sanctions on Iraq strongly influenced policy debates and were one of the main drivers of the subsequent redesign of sanctions on the government of Saddam Hussein," the authors of the new study wrote, citing Fawzi and Zaidi's research.
With Hussein's regime unmoved by the sanctions, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, was asked if the human cost was too high. Albright infamously replied that "the price is worth it."
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