HAVANA--When you talk to Charles Hill, you sense that he knows more than what he says about how his time in Cuba will end. A wanted man who has spent nearly two-thirds of his 59 years on the lam, Mr. Hill and two other men skyjacked a plane from Albuquerque to Cuba in Nov. 1971.
They fled the country after one of them (Mr. Hill won’t say who pulled the trigger) killed New Mexico State Trooper Robert Rosenbloom during a highway confrontation.
In the years since the three fugitives--members of the Republic of New Afrika, a Black-separatist group--arrived in Cuba, Ralph Goodwin drowned while trying to save another swimmer, and cancer took the life of Michael Finney.
Mr. Hill is the lone living member of the trio wanted for the killing of Trooper Rosenbloom; a crime for which he thinks he has done his time.
“I paid my price for that,” he commented Saturday. “I paid for that with the 38 [years] that I’ve been here in exile.”
The murder and skyjacking charges he faces won’t be satisfied that easily.
In fact, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and New Mexico prosecutors, no doubt, hope that the thawing relationship between the Obama administration and the government of Raul Castro will cause Cuba to ship him back to the United States.
At first, Mr. Hill told me he doesn’t think that’s going to happen. “Cuba is now my home, and the Cuban government won’t turn its back on me after all these years. I have no worries about that,” he said during an interview outside the Hotel Nacional, which was once a favorite haunt of the Cuban elite and American mobsters before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
But Mr. Hill has good reason to worry.
Late last month, Bisa Williams, the deputy assistant secretary of state of Western Hemisphere affairs, headed an American delegation that was in Cuba for a one-day meeting to discuss re-establishing direct mail service between the two countries.
Instead of returning to the United States after the talks ended, Miss Williams quietly extended her stay for five days and held unannounced talks with a senior official of Cuba’s foreign ministry, the first such high-level talks in seven years.
Despite his denial, Mr. Hill knows that the movement towards normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba doesn’t bode well for him and dozens of other American fugitives in this Caribbean Island nation.
It will ratchet up the pressure for his return to the United States to face murder and skyjacking charges.
“If it happens, it happens,” he said, just moments after assuring me that Cuba won’t return him to the United States.
“I need someone to write a book about my life,’ Mr. Hill said. “I need someone to tell my story who understands what could happen back then when a cop stopped a car with three black men wearing Afros.
“I regret that a life was lost, but it had to be that way,” he said of the deadly encounter with Trooper Rosenbloom.
“He drew his gun and he was going to kill us.”
That’s his version of what happened, which New Mexico prosecutors would love to challenge in court.
I don’t know whether they’ll ever get that chance, but I think Mr. Hill does.
In his mind, I think, he’s already written the final chapter of his life. I think he’s scripted his ending and is prepared for whatever will come.
“I’ll be here forever,” he said, with a glassy look in his eyes. “This is where I live and this is where I’ll die.”
