MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Kurlansky, Mark J.
Man Without a Country Fourteen years ago he stole a plane BY MARK J. KURLANSKY Michael Finney doesn't look like someone the FBI has been trying to get its hands on for fourteen years. He doesn't...
...I'm talking about how much I miss my family," he says...
...Finney is starting to feel better about his life...
...He looked into going to Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, or Jamaica, and in 1983 the Cuban government gave him and Hill $300 to fly to Jamaica...
...No one questioned the truck with the swirling light...
...He doesn't look like an accused cop killer...
...The three fugitives thought they might be jailed for a week or two...
...His slang is a decade out of date...
...My hands were sweating," Finney recalls...
...Small and lean, with a soft, articulate manner of speaking and calm, intelligent eyes, he hardly seems capable of holding six crew members and forty passengers at gunpoint while hijacking a plane to Cuba...
...He has only recently resigned himself to the "realization after many years that I can't go anywhere else...
...Only his mother once was able to obtain a visa for a brief visit...
...Back in 1971, Finney by his own description was "twenty years old, black, and angry...
...Crowded into the run-down vestiges of colonial opulence, thirty-five American hijackers lived together...
...The third man in the Finney case, Ralph Goodwin, drowned in a 1973 swimming accident...
...Then they called a garage and said their car had broken down...
...Mark J. Kurlansky is a free-lance writer based in Coral Gables, Florida...
...Finney does not specify who was holding the gun, but it was fired when Rosenbloom reached for his own weapon...
...I had a very short-sighted view of revolution...
...Most of the time I spent here was on trying to leave," Finney says...
...There were a couple of psychos, a few criminals, and some downright assholes," he says...
...But he also believes he helped force change...
...I am a very lucky guy," he says...
...The passengers remained calm and were dropped off in Florida, and the crew was told to fly to Cuba...
...Only Finney, his partner Charles Hill, and three other hijackers remain...
...I thought about death when I was young because I knew what I was into," he says, "but I never thought of living somewhere else and never coming back...
...He longs to know what has happened to those who played with John Coltrane...
...To struggle for a political cause, you can be creative," he says...
...He's heard of neighborhood organizations fighting police brutality in Newark and Boston and would like to go there...
...In one fifteen-minute meeting, the three concocted a desperate plan based on guesswork, chance, and the fevered imagination of people feeling cornered...
...Ididn't know what to expect in Cuba because I never thought about it," says Finney...
...authorities...
...It became a "hijacker house...
...Heading to Mississippi to support their fellow militants, Finney, Charles Hill, and Ralph Goodwin were stopped by police officer Robert Rosenbloom eight miles east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, on November 8. Finney himself no longer remembers the date...
...After dark, they went to a pay telephone and called the airport to ask when the last flight of the night left Albuquerque...
...Last January he was assigned an apartment in the picturesque downtown neighborhood of narrow Spanish streets called "old Havana...
...it began cooperating with the United States on hijackings and phased out the hijacker house in the mid-1970s...
...He relishes a chance to speak English and is so out of practice that he searches for words...
...When a tow truck arrived, they held the driver at gunpoint and ordered him to the airport, where he was directed to switch on his swirling orange light and go directly to the ramp of the loading Boeing 727...
...Over several years many left, usually returning to the United States to face charges...
...How much I miss black America...
...I think I have really messed up my life and hurt my mother, but I don't feel pity," he says...
...Since landing in Havana in 1971, Finney has been drifting from job to job, getting by while searching for a way out of Cuba...
...He married a Cuban in 1981 but they were divorced two years later...
...Then they were taken out to what had been the estate of a wealthy prerevolu-tionary entrepreneur...
...He does not seem miserable, walking down the bustling old streets of his historic neighborhood with his girl friend, an attractive twentyish black Cuban dancer...
...The officer was killed...
...Finney speaks well of Cuba, says he believes in socialism...
...Finney disguised himself as a woman, using heavy makeup, a red dress, and a purse in which he kept a loaded .45 automatic pistol...
...But his real problem is one of identity...
...The son of a cop, he knew what it meant to be hunted as a "cop killer...
...How much I miss my music...
...Finney attended Berkeley in the late 1960s, dropped out, and learned there were few jobs around for young blacks...
...They claimed to be tourists who had lost their passports in Mexico, but Jamaican officials held the two and called U.S...
...The large black population on the island, he says, mixes even less freely with whites than he was accustomed to in the United States...
...One police officer was killed and eleven Republic of New Africa members were arrested...
...Though he has not renounced his politics, Finney does have regrets...
...He learns of things going on in the United States, and it bothers him that he can't participate...
...I feel that, me and a lot of brothers who are in prison or dead now, we did something...
...They went out into the desert, burying themselves in sand and covering their heads with sagebrush to hide from police helicopters while waiting for nightfall...
...He doesn't even look like a black militant...
...It worked as though rehearsed...
...He envies American blacks like his former wife, who now works with a company that publishes black poetry...
...But he says he would be willing to do five years in a Federal prison to go back to the United States...
...He turned to the Black Panthers and then to a more radical group, the Republic of New Africa...
...I thought I was dead," says Finney...
...Finney and Hill have just completed training as bilingual translators and, after fourteen years of menial jobs, hope to start careers soon...
...Finney left behind a wife, a daughter, and his divorced parents...
...He believes it would cost much more than that...
...Apparently, the Cuban government felt the same way...
...In August 1971, members of this group clashed with police in Jackson, Mississippi...
...All but eight or nine were black...
...It took a lot of blood but I understood that it had to be that way...
...Finney remembers when there were as many as sixty hijackers in Cuba...
...After waiting ten years, he finally has been able to stop living in hotels...
...Finney and Hill returned to Havana...
...He begs for news of great jazz musicians from fifteen years ago...
...What's more, it was 1971, a time when police were killing black militants with some regularity...
...Communication has been difficult...
...he does recall, however, that an off-duty police officer insisted on arresting them and that the officer failed to raise his hands when the three ordered him to do so at gunpoint...
...As hijacking grew in popularity, Finney became disillusioned with his fellow pirates...
...I could become a Cuban citizen," says Finney, "but I could never become a Cuban...
...For three weeks the fugitives held out in Albuquerque as a dragnet around the city drew tighter...
...He found that fewer and fewer were politically motivated...
...Finney was unable to see his wife, and the couple decided to divorce in 1976...
...Finney recalls landing in Havana and believing for the first time in weeks that he was going to live...
...I have a feeling that I did not have a clear perspective to get in as deeply as I did," he says...
...Instead, they were held under fairly comfortable house arrest for six weeks and were interrogated for two hours each day...
...My mouth was completely dry...
...But the Americans seemed annoyed at being disturbed on a weekend and expressed little interest, simply suggesting that the two be sent back wherever they came from...
...Still, he finds that Cuba is not without racial barriers...
...If I had that perspective, I would have found a way to express myself and my beliefs without having caused as much suffering to my family, without leaving my child fatherless...
...He came from San Francisco, the son of a cop, his father being half of a well-known pair of black San Francisco juvenile squad officers who had broken a color barrier...
...The three boarded and ordered the plane to Florida...
Vol. 50 • January 1986 • No. 1
