Anticolonial Violence and Cleaver’s Road to Exile

From the beginning, the BPP walked a fine line with respect to the use of violence. The party’s colonial analysis of black America and its embrace of the examples provided by Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and the NLF distinguished it from the more narrow emphasis on self-defense offered by groups such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice or Robert F. Williams’s NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. The Panthers’ armed patrols constituted both a practical and symbolic challenge to the daily operation of police forces that “occupy our black communities like a foreign troop occupies territory.”4 After the Mulford Act, the party stopped the patrols but stepped up its rhetorical commitment to anticolonial violence. Even at their most provocative in 1966–67, however, Newton insisted that the Panthers’ use of firearms conform to state and local laws. And for all the calls to “off the pigs” and “kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom,” the BPP publicly disarmed in response to the Mulford Act rather than embark on a campaign of guerrilla warfare.5 The rhetorical violence embedded in the party’s anticolonial vernacular could be interpreted as a prelude to armed revolution, but it could just as easily be seen as a substitute for the real thing. Cleaver carried no weapons in his early days with the party (so as not to jeopardizing his parole status), and his prison writings cast doubt on the utility of violence as a tool of struggle against a state apparatus that was capable of mustering “unlimited firepower.”6

The ambiguity in the BPP founding leaders’ approach to anticolonial violence could be confusing to rank-and-file members and leaders outside of Oakland. Aaron Dixon, head of the Seattle chapter, recalled that “[a]l- though the party often invoked guerrilla warfare in articles and pictures in the party paper and on posters depicting armed men and women, the chairman [Seale] had never once informed me that I was to lead guerrilla attacks against police forces. At the time [1968] I did not realize that new chapters and branches all over the country were grappling with this same dilemma—to attack or not to attack.” Even among the upper echelons, David Hilliard later recalled, “Everybody in the Party wrestles with the issue of armed struggle.”7 Two developments combined to eventually lead elements within the BPP’s Oakland-based leadership to resolve this ambiguity in favor of a direct assault on the Oakland Police Department. The first was Newton’s arrest on charges of killing one Oakland police officer and badly wounding another in October 1967. While Newton vehemently proclaimed his innocence, others within the party interpreted the shootings as the opening salvo in a war of liberation for black America. In the Black Panther, Cleaver hailed Newton for “outshooting two pigs,” while an unsigned editorial in the same issue evoked Karl Marx in declaring that “[t]he weapon of criticism will never equal the criticism of weapons.” Emory Douglas celebrated “Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton defending the black community—two pigs down[,] two less to go.”8

Cleaver used the royalties from Soul on Ice to begin assembling a small arsenal, while questioning his own courage to follow what he believed to be Newton’s example of revolutionary violence. In raising his gun against the OPD, Cleaver asserted, Newton had made the most important statement “by a black man in Babylon since Nat Turner took his quota of heads in Virginia.”9 Newton continued to profess his innocence and urged caution, resisting suggestions to stage a jailbreak in favor of mounting a more traditional legal defense, while instructing the party to avoid spontaneous violence. But with Newton behind bars, Cleaver increasingly dominated the day-to-day running of the party and became its most visible public face. Convinced that Newton had “upped the ante” by “having offed the pig,” Cleaver clearly felt pressure to make a similarly dramatic contribution to the revolution. “After Huey offed pig officer John Frey,” he later wrote, “I slowly began to hold myself in contempt.”10

A second, and likely decisive, factor in pushing some Panthers from anticolonial rhetoric to anticolonial violence was the increasing state repression directed at the party in 1968. The Panthers’ decision to publicly disarm in response to the passage of the Mulford Act had not lessened tensions with local law enforcement, and Newton’s alleged role in killing an OPD officer only heightened police hostility. In Oakland and in the new chapters in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere, party members experienced frequent confrontations with police. In early 1968, Bay Area law enforcement officials stepped up their campaign against the Panthers by targeting their leaders for harassment. At 3:30 a.m. on January 16, heavily armed officers from the San Francisco Police Tactical Squad raided Cleaver’s home, kicking down the door and threatening Eldridge, Kathleen, and their guest Emory Douglas before departing without making any arrests. A little over a month later, Berkeley police officers burst into Bobby Seale’s house and dragged him and his wife away on weapons charges, which were subsequently dropped.11 Dozens of party members were brought up on charges in February and March 1968, and though most were eventually dropped, the effect was to give the impression that the police had declared open season on the Panthers. In response, Newton issued a communiqué from behind bars declaring that the assaults had brought the BPP to “a critical situation” and ordering all party members to “acquire the technical equipment to defend their homes” and be prepared to use it against police intrusions.12

Police actions against the Panthers in early 1968 culminated on April 3, when shotgun-wielding officers of the OPD invaded a party meeting at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. The church’s pastor, Father Earl A. Neil, was sympathetic to the Panthers, and the following day he held a press conference blasting the actions of the police.13 The press conference, however, was overshadowed by news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated by a sniper in Memphis. King had received relatively little attention from the BPP, even as his views on Vietnam and the plight of the inner city had begun to echo those voiced by the Panthers. His assassination, however, was a shock even to those who consistently highlighted the role of violence in perpetuating white supremacy. In a tape recording made just prior to leading the attack on Oakland police on April 6, Cleaver declared that King’s death signaled “the end of an era and the beginning of a terrible and bloody chapter.”

King’s assassination was clearly an important catalyst, but it needs to be understood against the background of escalating police actions against the Panthers in the preceding months as well as the anticolonial analysis of black America that Cleaver invoked in his declaration of war. In this context, the death of King was not an isolated national tragedy but rather part of the routine violence required to hold black Americans in colonial domination. As efforts to organize within the law had clearly proved inadequate, whether through King’s nonviolence, the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular, or the legal defense of Newton, “[a]ction is all that counts now,” Cleaver asserted.15

In an early sign of the split that would later divide the party, Cleaver’s decision to engage “openly in a war for the national liberation of Afro-America from colonial bondage to the white mother country” led to impassioned debate behind the scenes in the days after King’s murder.16 Although Chairman Hilliard embraced the rhetoric of anticolonial violence, he voiced strong opposition to Cleaver’s planned ambush. Hilliard objected to the action as contrary to Newton’s explicit directives, which promoted self-defense against police intrusions but also called for avoiding spontaneous acts of violence until the community was sufficiently organized for a proper revolutionary struggle. In the wake of King’s assassination, Newton restated these sentiments in private communications from behind bars, sentiments that he planned to share publicly by having his words read at a fund-raising event scheduled for Oakland’s DeFremery Park on April 7.17 In addition to this seemingly clear instruction from the party’s cofounder and minister of defense, Hilliard also had more practical concerns about Cleaver’s plan. “We’re not trained guerrilla fighters,” he argued. “Half of these guys don’t know how to hit the broad side of a barn.” After a climactic debate on the afternoon of April 6, Cleaver persuaded a majority of the assembled Panthers to take part in the action, and Hilliard reluctantly accepted the decision and agreed to accompany them.18 The ensuing “battle,” however, confirmed all of his fears and helped to divide the party permanently.

Cleaver later admitted, “We had no illusions that the fourteen of us who undertook this task were capable of defeating the Oakland Police Department or any other police department that night.” Rather, in a gendered reading of violence that owed much to Fanon, Cleaver hoped “to stand up as black men inside of Babylon and to give the pigs a taste of that which they had been issuing out to black people for four hundred years. A taste of their own medicine, specifically hot lead.”19 Even by this more modest measure, the action was a disaster. While accounts of the shootout vary, all agree that it began inauspiciously for the Panthers when, rather than executing a guerrilla ambush, Cleaver was surprised by two police officers after stopping the caravan of Panther cars to urinate in an alleyway.20 As Hilliard had predicted, the OPD had much of West Oakland staked out in anticipation of trouble and easily recognized the Panther cars as they cruised the neighborhood in search of targets. After an inconclusive exchange of fire, the BPP raiding party separated and fled. Cleaver and Hutton, the youngest member of the party at age seventeen, were trapped in a basement of a nearby house and subject to police gunfire and tear gas. Unable to breathe, the pair surrendered their weapons and emerged with their hands up. Police, however, fatally shot the unarmed Hutton before taking a wounded Cleaver into custody.21

The California Adult Authority immediately revoked Cleaver’s parole, and following a brief stay in an Oakland hospital he was sent to the state prison in Vacaville. After two months behind bars, however, a superior court judge granted Cleaver’s petition of habeas corpus, finding that, “[t]he peril to his parole status stemmed from no failure of personal rehabilitation, but from his undue eloquence in pursuing political goals … which were offensive to many of his contemporaries.”22 Free on bail pending charges stemming from the recent shootout (and the state’s appeal of the superior court’s decision), Cleaver embarked on a whirlwind series of speaking engagements in which he launched furious attacks on California governor Ronald Reagan—“[t]hat jive punk—the dickless motherfucker”—while promising “a guerrilla resistance movement that will amount to a second Civil War.” Revisiting the notion that insurrection at home would create opportunities for allies in the Third World, he trumpeted plans for domestic unrest so powerful that “the enemies of America can come in here and pick the gold out of the teeth of the Babylonians.”23 In many ways, the minister of information’s rhetorical fusillades upon his release from Vacaville represented a return to his early efforts on behalf of the BPP, which relied more on the charisma and eloquence that the superior court judge had cited than on his marksmanship. For all his talk of armed revolution, Cleaver was clearly more comfortable and effective leading college students in chants of “Fuck Ronald Reagan!” than he was planning and executing guerrilla ambushes.

Had he been allowed to remain free pending trial, Cleaver might have confined himself to a strategy of rhetorical confrontation. But when the California Supreme Court overruled the lower court and ordered his return to custody on November 27, Cleaver decided that he would rather be an exiled (or martyred) guerrilla fighter than an imprisoned intellectual. He initially planned a dramatic last stand at Merritt College, but Newton vetoed this plan from behind bars, sending a message instructing the minister of information to flee the country instead. This time Cleaver followed Newton’s directions. With the aid of the San Francisco Mime Troup, he disguised himself as an elderly man and slipped out of the Bay Area undetected the day before he was scheduled to surrender to the California Adult Authority. After a brief stop in Canada, Cleaver made his way to Cuba by boat. His aim upon reaching Havana on December 25, 1968, was nothing less than organizing a guerrilla army with which to take the fight back to the country that he called Babylon.24 Cleaver quickly discovered, however, that for all the Panthers’ success in building an organization with a national membership and international reach, dealing with even the most revolutionary of states provided challenges that rivaled in many ways those the party faced in the United States.

Cuba Libre? The Trials and Tribulations of Radical Internationalism

Arriving in Cuba was a dream come true for the budding American guerrilla warrior. Shortly arriving, Cleaver recalled, “I had an audience with Fidel Castro, shook his big hand. I thought everything was going to be wonderful.”25 Cuba had inspired Cleaver well before he had joined the Panthers. After seeing a television report while still in prison, he wrote to his lawyer Beverly Axelrod to enthuse, “How beautiful the Cuban Revolution is! The triumphant spirit of the people seemed to leap from the glass eye of the T.V. set, and Fidel was banging on the rostrum and blowing his soul to the people.” But it was more than a romantic attachment that brought Cleaver to exile in Cuba. Connections between Cuban officials and Cleaver’s editor at Ramparts (Robert Scheer), initial contacts the BPP had made with Cubans during the July 1968 visit to the UN, and the subsequent tour of the island by Panther representatives in August had led him to believe that Castro’s government was ready to support the party with more than words.26 Indeed, Cleaver’s ambitions upon reaching Havana transcended mere exile and protection from extradition. In addition to using the island as a base to “be able to print stuff and use their radio to broadcast to the United States,” he believed that he had reached an understanding with the Cuban government that “if I came to Cuba they would give me a facility for training some men and they would help us reenter the United States.”27 Far from arriving as a supplicant, Cleaver saw himself as a fellow revolutionary who was helping the Cubans by promoting guerilla warfare within the heart of the U.S. empire. “It wasn’t as though we went there begging,” he later recalled. “We went there to get what was ours.” This understanding, however, was based on what Cleaver himself later characterized as a “very naïve” reading of Cuban internal politics and Cuba’s position within the complicated calculus of the Cold War.28

Without access to the relevant Cuban documents, it is impossible to definitively reconstruct the evolving attitude of Castro’s government toward the U.S. Black Power movement in general and the BPP in particular. Nevertheless, the available evidence points to two underlying sources of tension between black militants and their sometimes-reluctant ally in the late 1960s. The first was Cuba’s shifting position in the international socialist bloc, which had both practical and ideological implications for its approach to groups such as the Panthers. Although Cuba in the radical imagination stood as a beacon of communist defiance ninety miles from U.S. shores, the reality was more complicated. In addition to facing U.S. hostility, including invasion and repeated assassination attempts, Castro’s government also had to negotiate its position with respect to the twin titans of the communist world. As with other nations in the Third World, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s provided Cuba with challenges and opportunities. In the best case, nations looking for aid could play Moscow and Beijing against one another while maintaining their own independence. As Sino-Soviet hostilities sharpened in the second half of the decade, however, it became more difficult for smaller nations to successfully maintain this balancing act. Siding with one communist power or the other had not only practical consequences in terms of receiving aid, but also ideological implications for thinking about the conduct of revolutionary foreign policy. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites emphasized a long-term view of worldwide revolution that downplayed immediate conflict with the United States. China in the 1960s, however, maintained a more militant approach toward confrontation with the “paper tiger” of U.S. imperialism, particularly in the Third World.29 Cleaver was broadly aware of the Sino-Soviet split when he arrived in Havana in December 1968, but he had little notion of how it might affect his own efforts in exile. He would soon find that dealing with the politics of the socialist world could be as confusing and frustrating as those back home.

Working from interviews and publicly available sources, historian Ruth Reitan has concluded that Cuban support for the Panthers fell victim to that nation’s changing national security policy and the need to take a side in the Sino-Soviet split. By the mid-1960s, Che Guevara’s policy of aggressively supporting revolutionary movements in both the First and Third Worlds, which closely corresponded to that of Mao’s China, had been defeated by a faction that was more closely aligned with the Soviet Union and shared Moscow’s belief that Cuban security demanded a cautious approach to relations with the United States.30 Robert F. Williams noted this shift firsthand from his exile in Havana, observing that by 1965, “[t]he Moscow-oriented elements in Cuba [had] gained the ascendency and the new party line was to curse everybody and everything that smelled even faintly Chinese.”31 Williams, who had formed cordial relations with the Chinese during a series of visits in 1963–64, was increasingly uncomfortable with the changing winds of Cuban politics and relocated to Beijing in July 1966. By this point, the new direction in Cuban foreign policy had already surfaced publicly at the January 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, when Castro publicly attacked the Chinese government, accusing them of siding with the United States and of “senility.”32

Cleaver had picked up on some of the internal shifts in Cuban policy while still behind bars. Watching a television report on a Cuban rally at the time of the Tricontinental Conference in 1966, he noted the conspicuous absence of Che Guevara. “I wonder about what became of Che,” Cleaver pondered in a letter to his lawyer. “He was ultimate on the Left … and it is said that a revolution devours its own children and who can deny that?”33 Guevara’s death as part of a failed Bolivian operation in 1967 coupled with a sustained economic crisis that left Cuba increasingly dependent on Soviet aid further entrenched the advocates of a conservative policy with respect to the United States.34 Cleaver, however, was unaware of the degree to which changes in Cuban national security policy and Cuba’s increasingly close ties to the Soviet Union would impact his own plans for a guerrilla base ninety miles from U.S. soil. Soon after arriving, however, it became clear that Castro’s government had little interest in further antagonizing the United States on his behalf. The Cubans agreed to shelter Cleaver but were unwilling to publicly announce his presence on the island, much less provide him a propaganda outlet similar to that they had once afforded Williams or a base with which to train Panther exiles for a guerrilla army. Though not privy to the high-level decision making that doomed his plans, Cleaver, like Williams before him, could sense the effects of the changing international landscape on his fortunes in Cuba. “[T]he point that had me more uptight than any other,” he recounted, “was that it was kind of clear that Cuba had sided with the Soviet Union against China in the internal struggle in the world socialist movement.”35

Kathleen Cleaver later recalled, “The Cubans … at that point with their Soviet mindset … they weren’t dealing with the issue of Blackness, they didn’t want to hear about it. To them, blackness was subversive.”36 The subversive nature of blackness in this context was not simply related to the Soviet desire to downplay race in favor of class when it came to building revolutionary coalitions. It was also related to the complicated history of Cuban race relations. In facing the world, Castro’s government presented itself as a vocal champion of antiracism, with a particular emphasis on support for the struggles of African Americans in the United States and liberation movements in Africa. Within Cuba, however, the situation was more complicated. Prior to the revolution, the island had been sharply divided by skin color, with light-skinned Cubans atop the political, economic, and social structure and dark-skinned Afro-Cubans and their descendants at the bottom. Though seldom expressed with the same legal clarity as Jim Crow laws in the United States, white supremacy was deeply woven into the fabric of Cuban life.37 From 1959 to 1961, the revolutionary government under Castro took important steps to combat this history of discrimination. In addition to publicly condemning anti-black racism and repealing legal impediments to full participation for dark-skinned Cubans, the revolution’s sweeping social measures, including land reform and various health, education, and literacy campaigns, brought tremendous gains to an Afro-Cuban population that tended to cluster in poorer and more rural areas.38

Despite early progress, three factors combined to limit the Cuban government’s willingness to engage with issues of race domestically after 1961, ultimately complicating relations with Cleaver and other African American exiles who sought to use the island as a base. The first was the persistence of pre-revolution racial ideology among the Cuban elite. It is hardly surprising that the mostly light-skinned Cubans who dominated the new government were unable to completely shed centuries of deeply ingrained notions of white supremacy upon taking power. Robert F. Williams complained that while “many Cuban officials … claim to be Socialist, they still have some of the same attitudes, and that is that blacks are to be discriminated against, and power should be in hands of whites.”39 By many accounts, Castro himself viewed black Cubans in paternalistic terms, seeing them as clients to be aided by the revolution rather than as partners in making their own liberation.40 This tendency was reinforced by the ideology of the revolution, which promoted a color-blind Marxism as the solution to the island’s history of discrimination and rejected racially based solutions as theoretically unsound and practically divisive. The government’s tilt toward the Soviet Union and its rigid interpretation of Marxism-Leninism only accentuated this tendency to downplay the salience of race, as opposed to the more flexible Maoist model that recognized racial nationalism as part of the larger struggle against capitalism and imperialism.41 Williams found that these various factors combined in Cuba, such that “[a]nyone who is Pro-Chinese or black nationalist is considered counterrevolutionary.”42

Concerns over internal security were the final blow to the revolution’s early efforts to engage with race in a domestic context. In the aftermath of the abortive U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Castro’s government moved to shore up its control over Cuban society by eliminating potential domestic threats. Among the major targets of the post-invasion crackdown were independent black political, economic, and social organizations. The Second Declaration of Havana, presented by Castro in February 1962, declared the issue of racism “eradicated” within the Cuban context, thus ending official debate on the matter and rendering those who raised the issue open to charges of aiding the island’s enemies.43 In the wake of economic troubles in the late 1960s, the government again targeted black intellectuals and activists, and Cleaver arrived in Cuba at arguably the height of anti-black hysteria in official circles.44 As a result, he was quickly forced to confront the contradiction between the Castro government’s outward-facing antiracism and its reluctance to acknowledge, much less deal with, the legacy of white supremacy in Cuba.

Although the visiting BPP delegation in August 1968 had been assured that “Cuban revolutionaries are prepared to give their lives for the cause of the Afro-Americans, which is the cause of the peoples of the world,” that commitment did not necessarily extend to black Americans within Cuba itself.45 African American exiles were tolerated, even publicly welcomed in many cases, so long as they were willing to keep to the script laid out by the Cuban government. Specifically, exiles were to keep the focus on U.S. racism while avoiding any comment or meddling in domestic racial affairs.46 Cleaver, however, was not so easily contained. Having already been warned by Stokely Carmichael that “the white Cubans were racists,” he quickly picked up on the government’s double standard with respect to race and repeatedly raised awkward questions of his hosts.47 His demand to train a black guerrilla army on Cuban soil at a time when the government was in the midst of a crackdown on Afro-Cuban organizing surely set off alarms in Havana. Even if aimed at a return to the United States, the notion of black men with guns parading around the island was likely as threatening to Castro’s government in Cuba as it was to Ronald Reagan’s in California.

Denied the base he believed he had been promised by Cuban representatives in New York, Cleaver took up informal organizing among African American exiles in Cuban. Havana was the preferred destination of the 154 U.S. commercial airline hijackers between 1968 and 1972, and the majority of those who ended up receiving political asylum in Cuba were African Americans.48 Motivated by factors ranging from political attachment to the Cuban revolution to a desire to escape local criminal charges, the skyjackers were an embarrassment to the United States but also something of a headache for Castro’s government. Unsure what to do with the high-profile refugees, Cuba officially welcomed most hijackers as guests. Privately, however, Cuban officials suspected many hijackers of either mental illness or being U.S. agents. Instead of the hero’s welcome they expected, most hijackers ended up in Cuban prisons, work camps, and, if they were lucky, halfway houses.49 Raymond Johnson, a hijacker from Louisiana who claimed to be affiliated with the BPP, implied that he was speaking for Cleaver when he sought out and complained to an Associated Press reporter in June 1969 that “[t]he Panthers have not been received in a revolutionary fashion.” Johnson also complained of “a peculiar kind of racial discrimination,” saying that “white Cubans “have a subconscious conspiracy to maintain control of the island.” While Seale and the Oakland-based BPP disavowed any connection with Johnson, his complaints mirrored those voiced in private by Cleaver.50 Some of the more politicized among the hijacker community in Cuba, including several who knew Cleaver from his time in prison, sought out the Panthers’ minister of information to complain of their treatment. Cleaver’s Havana penthouse apartment became known informally as la casa de las panteras, and it was soon home to a rag-tag network of hijackers, some of whom had run away from Cuban labor camps.51

Out of contact with his comrades in the United States and constantly watched by government minders, Cleaver came to see Cuba as “sort of a San Quentin with palm trees, an Alcatraz with sugar cane.” His attempt to organize African American hijackers only served to heighten tensions with his reluctant hosts. Cleaver later recalled that “the Cubans were trying to decide what they were going to do about us, since we had some guns in the pad—a pistol and two AK-47s. We were in that siege frame of mind, that Afro-American, ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ frame of mind.’ ”52 An American reporter finally broke the story of Cleaver’s presence in Cuba in May 1969, perhaps with his blessing as a way of ensuring that his hosts did not quietly jail or otherwise dispose of him. In the wake of this public revelation, and with Angela Davis scheduled to make a high-profile visit to the island, the Cuban government abruptly cut ties with Cleaver, hustling him onto a plane bound for Algeria.53 Cold War dynamics within the socialist camp, Cuban racial politics, the disruptive effects of global skyjacking, and his inability to negotiate with his hosts on equal terms had all combined to doom Cleaver’s ambitious plans to establish a base for the Panthers in Cuba.

Panthers in the Casbah: Algeria and the Pan-African Cultural Festival

Joined by a heavily pregnant Kathleen Cleaver shortly after his unexpected arrival in Algiers, Eldridge found himself marooned without contacts, institutional support, or a source of income. (The U.S. government had declared him to be a Cuban national, thus preventing payment of royalties from Soul on Ice).54 Cleaver’s knowledge of his new host country was almost entirely based on his reading of Fanon. “At that time,” he later admitted, “I didn’t know anything about Algeria.”55 Algiers hosted a number of prominent resistance groups, ranging from the Palestinian Fatah party to representatives of the South Vietnamese NLF, the African National Congress (ANC), and a variety of other sub-Saharan African groups dedicated to combating colonialism and white supremacist governments in their home countries. The Algerian government under Houari Boumédiène had broken relations with Washington in 1967 in protest against U.S. support for Israel during the Six-Day War and was bound by no extradition treaties with respect to U.S. fugitives. But while the adopted home of Frantz Fanon and oft-described “Mecca of the revolutionaries” seemed an ideal destination for a budding guerrilla warrior, Algeria posed its own complications for Cleaver.56

Cuban-Algerian relations had cooled after Boumédiène had replaced Algeria’s revolutionary hero and first independent president, Ahmed Ben Bella, in a 1965 military coup.57 Whether for this reason or because they were simply eager to wash their hands of the whole situation, the Cuban government apparently made no effort to even inform the Algerian government of Cleaver’s arrival, much less provide him with contacts or support in his new home. And while Boumédiène remained committed to continuing his predecessor’s material and rhetorical support for anticolonial rebels around the world, his domestic plans involved an expansion of Algerian natural gas production and exporting that would greatly benefit from improved relations with the United States. In the wake of the 1965 coup, CIA officials welcomed the leadership change, describing Boumédiène as “warm, open, and attentive to US officials.”58 U.S. support of Israel in the 1967 war and the ensuing occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza temporarily set back relations with Algiers. Economic factors, however, continued to push the two countries toward rapprochement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Kathleen Cleaver recalled, at the time she and Eldridge arrived in Algiers, “American technicians were working in Algerian oil fields, American oil companies had invested in the natural gas industry, and an American company was computerizing the operation of SONATRAC, the government oil corporation.”59 Thus, while safe from immediate extradition to the United States, Cleaver had to worry not only about his tenuous legal status within Algeria upon arrival, but also about whether the Boumediene government’s commitment to supporting anticolonial revolutionaries was strong enough to risk upsetting the increasingly close economic connections with U.S. companies by harboring a high-profile Black Panther fugitive.

As with the BPP’s transnational ventures in Europe, it took the timely intervention of a well-placed local contact to secure Cleaver’s entrée into the world of Algeria politics and diplomacy. Elaine Klein, an American-born sympathizer with the Algerian revolution and a former associate of Fanon, held a job in the Algerian Foreign Ministry at the time of Cleaver’s arrival. Upon finding out that Cleaver had been essentially dumped in Algeria by the Cubans, she was able to temporarily normalize his status in the country by securing him an invitation to attend the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers as part of a larger BPP delegation.60 Eldridge and Kathleen lived in spartan, state-provided accommodations while awaiting the arrival of the Panther delegation from the United States prior to the opening of the conference on July 21, 1969. For the Cleavers, it was not only a family reunion but also a chance for Eldridge to live openly after six months of silence and invisibility. He would be able to reconnect with comrades from the struggle in the United States while building on the work done in Europe and elsewhere to raise the BPP’s international profile.

The First Pan-African Cultural Festival, the result of planning by the OAU begun two years earlier in Congo, opened on the same day that American Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon. Cleaver dismissed the significance of the Apollo 11 mission, telling a U.S. reporter, “I don’t see what benefit mankind will have from two astronauts landing on the moon while people are being murdered in Vietnam and suffering from hunger even in the United States.”61 Keeping their focus firmly on earthbound events, the BPP used the conference as a venue for their anticolonial vernacular on a world stage and a practical opportunity for transnational and international alliance building. Thanks to Klein’s intervention, the Panther delegation, which included Cleaver as well Chief of Staff Hilliard, Minister of Education Hewitt, and Minister of Culture Douglas, was allowed to set up a public headquarters at the Afro American Information Center in downtown Algiers. With Douglas’s cartoons and posters adorning the walls and Panther leaders holding court in the heart of the Algerian capital, the BPP had a prominent public role at the festival.62 In an appearance alongside officials from Fatah, a confident Cleaver was greeted with chants of “Power to the People” and an outpouring of support from local residents who thronged to the center.63

Not only did the BPP delegation garner significant public and media attention, in Algiers they also had an opportunity to follow up on the transnational organizing efforts already begun in Europe by connecting directly for the first time with the leaders of popular resistance movements from across Africa and around the Third World. The Afro American Information Center was close to Fatah’s Algerian headquarters, and Cleaver struck up a warm relationship with the Palestinian resistance group and its leader Yasser Arafat.64 Prior to arriving in Algiers, Cleaver had expressed relatively little interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When asked in July 1968 about tensions in the region, the normally opinionated minister of information was at a loss for words, finally concluding, “I do not know what the solution to that problem is.” During his time in prison, Cleaver had claimed to be attending Jewish religious services and expressed significant interest in Theodor Herzl and Zionism.65 African American interest in Judaism was not unusual, however, particularly prior to 1967. As scholar Alex Lubin observes, “To many black radicals, Jewish diasporic politics, including the politics of Zionism, have been useful frames for understanding the politics of black nationalism.”66

Cleaver’s shift to embrace Arafat and the Palestinian cause was likely motivated both by genuine respect for fellow anticolonial fighters as well as by more pragmatic calculations. Israel’s dramatic victory over its Arab neighbors in the June 1967 Six-Day War and the ensuing occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank led a number of black activists to see that nation less as a plucky underdog and more as an aggressive colonial power.67 It also inflamed popular and government opinion in much of the Arab world. American support for Israel had long produced tensions in the region, and Algeria, which cut diplomatic relations with the United States in the wake of the 1967 war, was a particularly strong supporter of the PLO. “Living in Algeria,” Cleaver later recalled, “we were very conscious of the Arab position in support of the Palestinians.”68 The fact that Mao’s China, to which the Panthers had long looked for support and inspiration, also provided significant rhetorical and material support to the PLO in this period may have helped push the Panthers in this direction as well.69 As a result of the connections made in Algiers, Fatah and the BPP established close ties that were soon visible in the pages of the Black Panther as well as in Cleaver’s operations in exile. By September 1970, Cleaver stood should-to-shoulder with Arafat while proclaiming, “The Black Panther Party unequivocally supports the Palestinian people and their Vanguard forces in their struggle against the Zionist aggressor and the Hussein reactionaries who have combined with the US Imperialist aggressors to drown in blood the glorious march of the Palestinian people to freedom, liberty, independence, and peace.”70 International section member Donald Cox traveled to Kuwait at the invitation of Fatah in order to attend a Palestinian student conference in February 1971. Addressing the assembled delegates, he reaffirmed the party’s commitment to Palestinian liberation, declaring, “The young fedayeen being trained in the camps, on the battlefields, held captive, these are our revolutionary brothers. The young brothers in the ghettos of the U.S. are our fedayeen.”71

The festival provided further opportunities for Cleaver and the rest of the delegation to make direct connections with groups they had once invoked only in rhetoric and images. In a lively dinner held in a courtyard of the former headquarters of the FLN in the Casbah, the Panther delegation met with revolutionaries from Haiti, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to discuss anticolonial violence and the role of revolutionary culture in the global struggle against white supremacy.72 While the rhetoric employed by the Panther delegation in Algiers, stressing Third World solidarity, anticolonialism, and opposition to white supremacy, was consistent with that promoted in the pages of the Black Panther and elsewhere since 1967, Cleaver seized the opportunity at the festival to advocate moving beyond words. His time in exile had further convinced him that black Americans were analogous to colonized people in the Third World and that in both cases anticolonial violence was the only appropriate response. “We know that it is possible for us to overthrow the capitalist system, and to rid the earth of capitalism, imperialism, and neo-colonialism and also all forms of oppression entirely,” he declared. “It is our job to continue our struggle no matter what the resistance from the pigs might be.”73 Though frustrated in his initial attempts to bring the battle from a base in Cuba, Cleaver’s mingling with guerrilla leaders while in Algiers reinforced his revolutionary fervor. Asked by an Algerian interviewer what means the BPP would use to achieve its goals in the United States, Cleaver responded curtly: “Guns, guns.” When asked what additional tools he might consider, he added, “And bombs. Guns. Just like you had to do it here.”74 Though recognizing that the Panthers in the United States were up against “a highly industrialized, a highly mechanized, and mobile military establishment that has communications that we cannot hope to match,” he insisted that the Panthers were “perfectly willing to continue to the bitter end, whatever that might be.”75 Nor was Cleaver’s rhetoric confined to vague pronouncements. In an interview with journalist Lee Lockwood he offered both specific strategies (“Simple things like the fact that all the lights should be broken out in Babylon”) as well as the prediction “that by 1972 we will have a military coup in the United States and a military dictatorship, because by that time there will be a full-scale war going on in the United States.”76

Cleaver’s increasingly fervent commitment to anticolonial violence needs to be understood not only against the background of domestic events leading up to the botched April 6 action in Oakland and his interactions with guerrilla leaders while in exile. It also needs to be viewed with respect to the larger debate over the relationship between culture and revolution at the Pan-African Cultural Festival as well as developments within Algeria and the BPP. In a firsthand report on the festival in the Black Scholar, black studies pioneer Nathan Hare identified two major issues that divided the participants. The first was the debate between advocates of negritude, a philosophy espousing a common black culture linking the nations of Africa and the diaspora (a notion mostly common associated with Senegalese politician, poet, and intellectual Léopold Senghor), and those who followed Fanon’s line in rejecting cultural or racial essentialism as a distraction from revolutionary struggles for freedom.77 The second, a related though more narrow debate, was between black Americans at the conference who supported the BPP’s broad-based formulation of revolutionary nationalism and those who identified with a more essentialist pan-Africanism. Stokely Carmichael, who had moved to Guinea and would become known as Kwame Ture, was the most prominent advocate of the latter position in Algiers. Carmichael had publicly resigned from the Panthers in February 1969, citing among other things the party’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism as being incompatible with his more Afrocentric vision of black liberation. Cleaver blasted Carmichael in an open letter from exile, and the two men had a tense confrontation at the festival. “The victims of Imperialism, Racism, Colonialism and Neo-colonialism come in all colors,” Cleaver insisted, “and … they need a unity based on revolutionary principles rather than skin color.”78

Against this backdrop, Cleaver’s public statements in Algiers need to be understood as part of an effort to position the Panthers within the revolutionary nationalist camp inside the United States and as disciples of Fanon on the world stage. Rejecting negritude, the BPP in Algiers joined those embracing a broadly based revolutionary culture that stressed solidarity among the oppressed and a commitment to action rather than celebrating the past glories of Africa or extolling the essential virtues of blackness. As “Masai” Hewitt explained it, “Our interest in culture is only in the caliber of the culture, whether it be a .308 Winchester or a .357 Magnum.”79 In stressing their willingness to match revolutionary words with actions, the Panthers were also undoubtedly trying to justify their high profile at the festival and establish parity with more the more established revolutionary groups represented in Algiers. This was particularly important for Cleaver, who needed to burnish his credibility as a guerrilla spokesman in order to help win the support, or at least tolerance, of the Boumédiène government. In making the case for his relevance on the world stage while in Algiers, Cleaver often fell back on notions of African American exceptionalism that the BPP had inherited from RAM and continued to promote in its anticolonial vernacular. In conversation with fellow revolutionaries from the Third World, he stressed the unique and strategic position of black Americans within the belly of U.S. imperialism. Other revolutionary groups, he insisted, “have an interest in any amount of pressure that we can put on that government because, if we can just slow it down and force it to have to deal with us, then the other people would be able to liberate themselves and then in return we would expect them to come to our rescue.”80

Cleaver’s militant statements were also likely motivated by the need to stake out a position in the emerging split within the BPP over the role of anticolonial violence in the black liberation struggle. While the party, at least nationally, remained firmly committed to revolutionary nationalism, the internal debate over the timing and means by which to carry out that revolution had only grown sharper in the wake of the disastrous April 6 shoot-out and Cleaver’s subsequent exile. As Cleaver tried to organize a guerrilla army in Cuba, the Oakland-based BPP moved in a very different direction. The BPP initiated the first of its “survival programs” in January 1969 by offering free breakfasts to Oakland schoolchildren. The breakfast program was subsequently expanded to include a wide range of community services in chapters around the country, including sickle cell anemia testing, busing of relatives of prisoners to visit their loved ones, and starting an innovative school for children in Oakland. Though the BPP leaders stressed that these programs were not liberal social reforms but rather about “survival pending revolution,” they nevertheless represented a significant shift away from the more confrontational approach that marked the party’s origins and early operations.81 Even as the pages of the Black Panther continued to celebrate anticolonial violence both at home and in the Third World, U.S.-based Panther leaders including Newton, Hilliard, Seale, Ericka Huggins, and Elaine Brown had learned hard lessons from two years of brutal confrontation with the federal government and local police. While Cleaver could confidently declare from exile that “[r]epression strengthens our party,” those left behind to bear the brunt of that repression drew a different conclusion.82 With scores of Panthers dead or behind bars and the party’s coffers drained by constant battles with the legal system, armed revolution would have to wait until the BPP had not only recovered its strength, but also built strong enough support in the community to withstand the battering inflicted by agents of the state.

The survival programs and the approach they represented were in direct contrast to the more aggressive line pursued by Cleaver from exile, largely isolated from the changes taking place back home in Oakland and elsewhere in the first half of 1969. The arrival of Hilliard and the BPP delegation in Algiers undoubtedly brought to the surface larger debates over the future of the party that dated back to Hilliard and Cleaver’s dispute before the April 6, 1968, action. While Cleaver offered some tepid public support for the survival programs, in an interview from Algiers with filmmaker William Klein he insisted that “[w]e have a breakfast for children program … but that’s not what the Black Panther Party is all about.” What was needed, he declared, was not simply survival programs but “some liberated territory in Babylon that we are willing and prepared to defend, so that all the exiles, fugitives, draft-dodgers, and runaway slaves can return to help finish the job.” Privately he lamented the new direction of the party, which he ascribed primarily to Hilliard’s influence.83 There was almost certainly a gendered aspect to Cleaver’s rejection of these programs as his preferred means of effecting change was “to stand up as black men inside of Babylon and to give the pigs a taste of … hot lead.”84 In his public embrace of Fatah and other guerrilla movements as well as his increasingly bellicose statements about armed revolution, Cleaver was clearly seeking to combat what he saw as the reformist drift of the BPP and stake his claim to leadership of the party from exile.

Despite tensions behind the scenes and the public feud with Carmichael, the BPP’s appearance at the Pan-African Cultural Festival was undeniably successful in terms of international and transnational engagement. As with the Panthers’ other overseas ventures, it is important not to lose sight of the tremendous leap that the Panthers made from a small, local group on the verge of extinction in late 1967 to an internationally recognized organization that held its own, at least publicly, with established groups such as Fatah and the ANC. The festival and the Panthers’ presence at the Afro American Information Center not only represented a public relations triumph, it also provided the party’s first genuine links to Third World guerrilla groups. Combined with the growing network of supporters in western Europe and the United States, the contacts made by the BPP in Algiers provided the basis for an extraordinarily broad coalition that promised to put flesh on the bones of the party’s anticolonial vernacular. For Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, however, the transnational links built during the event were encouraging but not sufficient. While the rest of the Panther delegation could declare victory in Algiers and return home, the minister of information remained an exile dependent on the goodwill of the Algerian government for his continued protection. During the course of the festival, several hijackers with whom Cleaver had associated in Cuba, including Byron Booth, Clinton Smith, and James Patterson and his family, arrived in Algeria hoping to find a more welcoming reception than they had received in Havana.85 While swelling the ranks of his nascent Panther cell, the new arrivals also increased the pressure on Cleaver to win official recognition and secure funding for his operations in Algiers.

Beyond the need for a safe place for his family and comrades to live, Cleaver also retained a genuine commitment to make good on his oft-delayed plans for assembling an army of guerrilla warriors with which to bring the battle back to the United States. In interviews from Algiers, he made clear that he had no desire to die in exile. “I have to return to Babylon, to live or die in Babylon,” he declared, “but to fight, as it is only human to do.”86 Making good on this promise, however, would require the kind of support that only nation-states were capable of offering. However exciting it might be to brush shoulders with African and Arab guerrilla movements, these groups were still struggling to liberate their own countries and could not provide the logistical and financial assistance that Cleaver needed if he wanted to mobilize his own revolutionary army. Indeed, one of the few points of agreement between Cleaver and Carmichael in 1969 was that any successful black revolution in the United States would require practical alliances with sympathetic national governments.87 But while Carmichael sought this support from African nations on the basis of racial and cultural affinity, Cleaver pursued an alternative strategy that leveraged the Cold War in Asia to facilitate his efforts to build a base of operations for his revolutionary army in Algiers.

The DPRK, Vietnam, and the Asian Strategy

The period from mid-1969 through early 1971 constituted a second act for both Cleaver and BPP internationalism, one more closely rooted in the nuances of Cold War geopolitics and Asian variations of Marxism-Leninist theory than in the sweeping rhetoric of the party’s anticolonial vernacular. Scholars including Judy Wu, Robin Kelley, Fred Ho, Bill V. Mullen, Robeson Taj Frazier, and Betsy Esch have detailed the intellectual and ideological appeal of Asian socialist nations to black radicals in the 1960s.88 In the case of the BPP’s Asian strategy, however, the underlying motivation had as much to do with the practical dilemmas that Cleaver confronted in exile as it did with idealized notions of “the revolutionary hope of the East.”89 In a series of ad hoc efforts to carve out an international power base for both himself and the BPP, Cleaver abandoned the notion of nonalignment or an alternative Third World approach to international relations in favor of a more direct engagement with the Cold War in Asia. He also moved away from informal transnational coalitions in favor of more direct ties to nation-states. “We find our most efficacious and useful alliances,” he declared in December 1970, “are with those people who are directly confronted with the aggression by the U.S. imperialist government.”90 In practice, the NLF, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG), and the governments of North Vietnam and North Korea were Cleaver’s most important allies during this period. Unlike the Cuban and Algerian governments, none of these entities were concerned with antagonizing the United States, and they welcomed support from American dissidents of all stripes. These Cold War–inspired alliances not only facilitated high-profile public events for Cleaver in Asia, they also afforded him leverage in his negotiations with the Algerian government in pursuit of a more permanent base of operations inside that country while simultaneously bolstering his position inside an increasingly divided BPP leadership structure.

It was the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—North Korea—that provided the initial opening for Cleaver’s new strategy. In the midst of the Pan-African Cultural Festival in July 1969, the North Korean embassy requested an audience with Cleaver, with Elaine Klein acting as an intermediary.91 Without access to the North Korean diplomatic archives, it is impossible to know for certain what prompted the DPRK to reach out to Cleaver and the BPP. Given the degree to which Kim Il-sung had consolidated control over the country’s political and security apparatus by the mid-1960s, however, it seems unlikely that the embassy in Algiers acted without consulting Pyongyang first. At the ensuing meeting, the North Korean ambassador extended an invitation to Cleaver to attend the “International Conference of Journalists of the Whole World in the Fight Against U.S. Imperialist Aggression,” which was to be held in Pyongyang in September.92 Cleaver accepted, thus beginning a relationship that would have important practical and ideological consequences for the development of the BPP and its international strategy over the next three years.

To twenty-first-century observers accustomed to thinking of the DPRK as a paranoid, isolated regime ruled by an eccentric dynasty of dictators unable to feed their own people, Kim Il-sung’s North Korea might seem a strange choice of allies for the freewheeling Cleaver and the BPP. In the late 1960s, however, this pairing made a good deal of sense for both parties. Belying its reputation as a hermit kingdom, North Korea aggressively pursued leadership in the Third World in the 1960s, positioning itself as a small, formerly colonized country that had successfully fought off the United States while maintaining its independence from both Moscow and Beijing. To outside observers, throughout much of the 1960s North Korea contrasted favorably in many ways with South Korea, with its sputtering economy and corrupt military dictatorship propped up by U.S. aid. South Korea was still occupied by American troops. The DPRK, meanwhile, appeared to have succeeded not only in rebuilding but also vastly expanding its industrial base in the wake of the Korean War while avoiding vast disparities of wealth and providing its citizens with all the basic consumer necessities.93 Internationally, North Korea flexed its diplomatic muscles by bidding farewell to Chinese “volunteer” troops in 1958, opening relations with dozens of new governments in the Third World in the early 1960s, and providing direct aid to revolutionary movements. Kim personally traveled to Indonesia in 1965 to address a summit marking the tenth anniversary of the Bandung Conference as part of a larger bid to exercise North Korean leadership in the Third World.94 His government undoubtedly saw these alliances as a way to cement the DPRK’s international position and stake out its independence from its Soviet and Chinese patrons. In this context, reaching out to the BPP was a logical extension of efforts to cultivate goodwill in the Third World. Not only would it provide a propaganda opportunity against the United States, it also helped to showcase North Korea’s leading role in supporting revolutionaries around the world struggling against the legacy of both capitalism and white supremacy.

Cleaver’s decision to accept the invitation to the Pyongyang conference of radical journalists had as much to do with a pragmatic assessment of his current situation in Algiers as it did with the specific appeal of the DPRK’s ideology and foreign policy. With the end of the Pan African Cultural Festival, the Cleavers and the small group of Panther exiles living in Algiers were at loose ends and in need of any support they could get. The invitation offered not only a chance to cultivate goodwill with the DPRK but also to make other connections that might prove useful in building his international power base in Algiers.95 Accompanied by Byron Booth, one of several hijackers who followed Cleaver from Cuba to Algeria, the Panthers’ minister of information arrived in Pyongyang on September 11, 1969. Once again, however, the Sino-Soviet split served to confuse and frustrate Cleaver as he worked to expand the BPP’s international influence. Upon arrival, he found that Chinese, who were still engaged in a border conflict with the Soviet Union that dated back to March 1969, were not in attendance at the conference. The Soviet participants, meanwhile, frustrated Cleaver by seeking “to water down the positions that were being taken.” In his notebook he wrote, “[T]o me … it was disgusting especially to watch the so-called Marxist-Leninists from the first Socialist country in the world … reduced to abject reactionaries.” He likewise privately lamented that “[t]he contradiction between the Soviet position and the Chinese position has resulted in a stalemate of stultifying confusion in the international Proletarian World Revolution,” and he wondered how he would be able to explain to comrades in the United States “why the Russians and Chinese are killing each other and why the Chinese are not at the Conference.”96

In the midst of the confusion and infighting of the Sino-Soviet split, the position taken by the DPRK was a refreshing change for the small BPP delegation. Not only was Kim’s government unbendingly hostile to the United States and its allies, it also appeared to have avoided the infighting that was gripping much of the socialist world in the late 1960s. Cleaver declared the DPRK to be “beautiful, clean, honest, free, and totally revolutionary” and celebrated Kim’s role in developing an indigenous Third World variation of Marxism that had helped his country remain independent in the face of both U.S. aggression and Sino-Soviet confusion and duplicity.97 Booth hailed his visit as “like catching glimpses of the future … seeing what unity and the correct revolutionary program can create for those intent upon putting an end to oppression and the exploitation of man by man.”98 Undoubtedly, Cleaver’s and Booth’s opinions of the DPRK were shaped by the carefully controlled nature of their visit, which included tours of “the schools and the co-operatives where production exceeds the hideous dreams of the pig capitalists,” somber war museums and memorials, and an opportunity to confront U.S. troops at the armistice line at Panmunjom.99

While Cleaver and Booth were certainly naïve about the degree to which average North Koreans were “free,” the appeal of the DPRK for the Panther delegation transcended mere propaganda. After having experienced firsthand the ripple effects of the Sino-Soviet split in Havana, Algiers, and Pyongyang, Cleaver appreciated the fact that “[t]he Koreans don’t bite their tongues at all, they tell it like it is and they take a very revolutionary attitude, an anti-imperialist attitude and I can say they are serious.”100 His hosts also apparently endorsed and encouraged Cleaver’s plans for urban guerrilla warfare in the United States—which he developed in great lengths in his notebooks during the course of the conference—offering him the opportunity to engage in target shooting in addition to the more theoretical work associated with the conference.101 “These people really relate to the gun on a deep level,” he enthused, “and what they want to do is off Yankees and that’s—there ain’t no bull shit about that.”102 Moved by what appears to have been a combination of genuine enthusiasm for the DPRK’s aggressive blend of communism and nationalism as well as a desire to secure practical support for his fledging operations in Algiers, Cleaver stayed on for several weeks after the conference to tour the country and receive additional political instruction. He and Booth returned to Algeria fired up with enthusiasm for Juche—Kim Il-sung’s unique contribution to the development of Marxism-Leninism.

Loosely translated as meaning self-reliance, Juche was first promulgated by Kim in 1955 and subsequently developed over the next two decades into an increasingly elaborate state ideology. Combining elements of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Confucianism, and Korean nationalism, Kim sought to adopt communism for the unique circumstances of the DPRK while simultaneously serving notice that the North was not beholden, ideologically or otherwise, to its more powerful patrons in Moscow and Beijing. As explained by Kim in an article reprinted in the Black Panther, “The establishment of Juche means holding fast to the principle of solving for oneself all the problems of the revolution and construction in conformity with the actual conditions at home, and mainly by one’s own efforts … applying the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism and the experiences the international revolutionary movement to one’s country in conformity with its historical conditions and national peculiarities.”103 For Cleaver and other admirers outside of North Korea, the ideological appeal of Juche was similar to that of Maoism, with its emphasis on making nationalism compatible with Marxism-Leninism. By the late 1960s, however, the clarity of China’s revolutionary message was muddied by the complications of Sino-Soviet infighting and the internal chaos unleashed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The DPRK, meanwhile, offered an example of a much smaller nation that seemed to have forged a revolutionary path independent of both the capitalist West and the two giants of the socialist world. As such, Juche-era North Korea offered an appealing model to both revolutionary states in the Third World and to groups such as the Black Panthers that sought to meld nationalism with a form of proletarian internationalism while maintaining their own freedom of action. As Cleaver explained, “[I]t’s a concept of self-reliance that justifies the independent existence of each party and gives it some ideological defenses against the type of domination that is traditional in the Socialist movement.”104 Booth was blunter in advocating replacing that “Maoist type … shit going on now in the United States [with] Kim Il Sung because we have got to build a consciousness to this cat, to the Korean situation, to his writings, etc.”105

“Juche, baby, all the way,” was a message that quickly spread from Cleaver’s notebooks into the speeches of other Panther leaders as well as the pages of the Black Panther as the minister of information helped introduce Kim’s gospel to the United States by way of Algiers.106 In the six months after Cleaver’s visit, the Panther paper regularly featured articles explaining and celebrating Juche as well as the “heroic leader Kim Il Sung” and the “beautiful people, so vigorously mobilized, so efficiently organized, moving with the harmony of one man”—the people over whom he presided. In March 1970 the Black Panther featured a special seven-page supplement focused on the DPRK, with an introduction by Cleaver that linked the detention of pro-North Korean activists in South Korea to “the railroading of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, the Chicago Seven … through the pig courts of Babylon.”107 The North Korean government reciprocated with statements of support and further opportunities for travel and international exposure. DPRK state media made numerous favorable mentions of the Panthers, and in January 1970 Kim addressed a New Year’s telegram to the BPP, celebrating “the militant ties between the Korean people and the progressive black people of America … in the battle against U.S. imperialism[,] our common enemy.”108 Cleaver was personally rewarded for his efforts on behalf of the DPRK with an invitation to return to Pyongyang as head of his own delegation in 1970.109 The U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation (covered in more detail in the next chapter) would be the high-water mark of the Panthers’ international engagement and was made possible in large part by Cleaver’s willingness to directly engage with the Cold War in Asia.

If the DPRK played the most important role in facilitating Cleaver’s access to travel and publicity while in exile, it was the NLF and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG) that helped to secure his place within Algeria. As was the case with the DPRK, Cleaver was introduced to the NLF in Algiers by Elaine Klein. At the Pan-African Cultural Festival, Cleaver stood beside NLF representatives, declaring that they faced the same enemy and that “we need each and we love each other.” The Vietnamese, in turn, hailed him with a Black Power salute and presented Cleaver with a ring made from the scrap metal of downed American bombers (which he dubbed “the first good use I’ve ever seen those war materials put to”).110 Cleaver was invited to attend a memorial ceremony for Ho Chi Minh at the NLF’s Algerian headquarters shortly before leaving on his first Korean trip, and while in the DPRK he made contact with both the NLF and government representatives from North Vietnam.111

Cleaver had multiple reasons for embracing connections to the Vietnamese. Like RAM and SNCC before it, the BPP had long championed the cause of the South Vietnamese resistance while linking it directly to their own struggles against “community imperialism” and police brutality in urban black neighborhoods. More practically, public affiliation with the NLF would not only raise the profile of the BPP in the socialist world, it would also improve the Panthers’ position in Algeria and the Third World more broadly. Opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam was one of the few factors that united the diverse group of states outside the orbit of the United States.112 Forging a high-profile connection with the Vietnamese thus offered Cleaver an opportunity to simultaneously build support for his base of operations in Algiers and win further international attention. It also undoubtedly helped to bolster his position within the BPP at a time when the combination of exile and internal splits within the party left him increasingly isolated from the movement in the United States.

The NLF and the government of North Vietnam had reasons of their own for seeking a public alliance with the BPP in 1969. Support from U.S. dissidents and antiwar activists was always welcome, but it was particularly important in the period from 1968 to 1971. As historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen detailed in her pioneering study Hanoi’s War, the decision by the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP), and particularly General Secretary Le Duan, to embark on an ambitious plan to win military victory in the South with the 1968 Tet Offensive had important repercussions for Vietnamese military and diplomatic efforts. While Tet was a political success to the extent that it turned many Americans against what appeared to be an endless war, it was a military disaster for both the NLF and North Vietnam. Forced to abandon dreams of military victory in the South, at least for the three years following Tet, the VWP and its allies in the South shifted to diplomacy as a way of buying time and following up on the offensive’s political successes. The most obvious sign of this strategy was the informal diplomatic talks held with U.S. representatives in Paris starting in May 1968. In addition, however, the VWP and NLF both actively courted the U.S. antiwar movement during this period as a useful diplomatic lever at a time of military deadlock. While further work remains to be done in Vietnamese archival sources on the specific nature of these connections, the NLF’s approach to Cleaver and the BPP was a logical extension of the diplomatic strategy of the Vietnamese revolution during this time.113

Cleaver and his fledgling diplomatic mission in Algiers reaped numerous benefits from his association with the Vietnamese. Cleaver’s People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation would eventually be invited to Hanoi in August 1970, where his public appearances burnished the BPP’s revolutionary credentials in both the United States and the Third World. More important from a day-to-day perspective was the role that Vietnamese representatives in Algiers played in the development of what would eventually become the international section of the BPP. “It was only through the successful promotion and sponsorship of the Vietcong,” Cleaver acknowledged, “which soon became the Provisional Government of Vietnam [PRG], that we broke through to any recognition or status.”114 Not only did the NLF and PRG vouch for Cleaver in meetings with Boumédiène, they also ended up providing him with a new and prestigious venue for his Algerian operations. When the Algerian government formally recognized the PRG as the government of South Vietnam and accorded them an embassy in 1970, Cleaver and his crew of exiles was allowed to occupy the NLF’s former headquarters, a two-story villa in the El Biar section of the Algiers.115 While the Algerian government provided the building and an accompanying stipend for the international section (primarily due to the intervention of Mohammed Yazid), it was the ongoing endorsement of the NLF and PRG that facilitated this arrangement. The Vietnamese “not only lent credibility to my overseas operations,” Cleaver explained, “but intervened on our behalf when the Algerians clamped down.”116 More broadly, the government of North Vietnam gave the BPP a propaganda coup by offering to release a number of U.S. POWs in exchange for the freedom of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.117 In return, Cleaver contributed to propaganda broadcasts for both the NLF and the government of North Vietnam and passed on material for publication in the Black Panther.118

While the BPP’s Asian strategy, of which Cleaver was the primary author, maintained the Panthers’ earlier focus on the Third World, the terms of that engagement changed significantly. Cleaver’s efforts in this period were characterized by direct, government-level contacts with representatives of North Korea and North Vietnam (as well as with the NLF and PRG) rather than the broad symbolic and rhetorical gestures that had marked the BPP’s engagement with the Third World in 1967–68 or the transnational organizing efforts of 1968–69. Although not entirely incompatible with the broadly defined Third World solidarity of the party’s anticolonial vernacular, this new approach mandated a more narrowly focused emphasis on the geopolitics of the Cold War in Asia. Where the Black Panther had once featured an analysis of foreign developments filtered through the lens and expressed in the language of the urban black experience in the United States, in 1969–70 it increasingly served as a venue for reprinting state-generated propaganda pieces from the party’s new Asian allies. To this extent, the party’s anticolonial vernacular eroded as a result of its direct engagement with the Cold War, supplemented but not entirely replaced by a more narrow state-level discourse that often had little direct connection to the daily lives of the party’s rank-and-file members and supporters in the United States.

The era of the Asian strategy also coincided with a refinement of the BPP’s previously scattershot and impressionistic Marxism. The attention given to Juche by the Panthers during this period did not extend to the formulation of any kind of formal party line, but it did result in the Panthers giving considerably more attention to the doctrinal nuances of Marxism-Leninism. The origins of this shift predated Cleaver’s Asian trip and coincided with the BPP’s escalating feud with various cultural nationalist groups, most notably Maulana Karenga’s US Organization in Los Angeles. In July 1969, as tensions increased between the Panthers, US and pan-Africanists such as Carmichael, the party amended its ten-point program to replace references to “white men” with “capitalists.”119 Cleaver, however, increased the BPP’s explicit engagement with Marxism-Leninism in the aftermath of his first trip to the DPRK in the fall of 1969. During the course of that visit, he developed a detailed critique of the BPP’s original ten-point program, declaring that it was “limited to the contradictions of the Black colony” and “not based firmly upon Marxism-Leninism.” Having “outgrown present program,” he concluded, “[w]e must issue [a] new expanded party program”—one that moved away from the narrow focus on black America to “attack complete system.”120 Though careful not to voice such blunt criticisms of the party in public, Cleaver subtly pushed for a greater engagement with class struggle in a June 1970 pamphlet that was later reprinted in the Black Panther. The time had come, he suggested, to adapt “the classical principles of scientific socialism” to the specific historical experience of African Americans. In the process, he hailed both Mao and Kim Il-sung for their selective application of Marxism-Leninism to fit the conditions in their own countries and identified Huey Newton as having picked up their mantle by providing “the ideology and methodology for organizing the Black Urban Lumpenproletariat.”121 This embrace of the finer points of revolutionary doctrine was not limited to Cleaver. Despite the tensions between the two men, David Hilliard joined Cleaver in November 1969 in declaring that “[t]he ideology of the Black Panther Party is the historical experiences of Black people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism.”122 Although the BPP remained ideologically diverse, particularly at the local level, during the Cleaver-led engagement with the Cold War in Asia the party came as close as it ever would to formalizing its commitment to Marxism-Leninism.

The new international approach promoted by Cleaver in 1969–70 yielded some initially impressive results. When he arrived in Algiers in June 1969, Cleaver’s fortunes had been at low ebb. Cut off from his comrades in the United States and unceremoniously ejected from Castro’s Cuba, Cleaver was operating in a foreign city without contacts, funds, or even legal permission to be in the country. A little more than a year later, he was not only well established in Algeria but also on the verge on embarking on a foreign tour that would see him feted by generals and heads of state in Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Beijing. Upon his return, he would preside over the formal opening of the BPP’s international section in what had been the Algerian headquarters of the NLF, symbolism that Cleaver surely appreciated. None of these accomplishments would have been possible without Cleaver’s willingness to directly engage with the Cold War in Asia. The Asian strategy, however, also came with risks and costs. In forging direct alliances with foreign governments, Cleaver left himself increasingly dependent on the whims of his new allies and highly sensitive to changes in the Cold War environment. Moreover, his engagement with the geopolitics of the Cold War while in exile sometimes served to distance him from the issues that had initially inspired his engagement with the black freedom struggle. As Cleaver prepared to fly off for a three-month Asian tour in July 1970, events in Oakland, Washington D.C., and Beijing were conspiring to undermine the BPP’s international strategy just as it appeared poised to enter the spotlight on the world stage.