HAVANA — William Potts calls himself the “Homesick Hijacker.” U.S. authorities have another name for him: fugitive harbored by an enemy government — one of dozens of Americans hiding in communist Cuba.
Almost 25 years ago, he smuggled a pistol onto a commercial flight, diverted the plane to Havana and spent more than 13 years in a Cuban prison for air piracy.
Now the Mount Vernon, N.Y., native has written to President-elect Barack Obama seeking a pardon and hoping U.S.-Cuba relations will improve and he will be able to come home.
Others among the more than 70 American fugitives in Cuba fear the opposite: that a thaw in the nearly 50-year-old freeze between neighbors will put them within the reach of U.S. law.
“It’s not a good time to raise my name up there,” said Charlie Hill, who was accused in the slaying of a New Mexico state trooper and hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1971. “Things are going good. I don’t want to be in the limelight.”
Neither government would comment on the subject because these are sensitive times — a change of U.S. administrations, and indications that both Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro are ready to make tentative moves toward detente.
Among other issues, U.S. officials hope Cuba will cooperate in apprehending a ring of Cuban-Americans who fled to Cuba from Florida in a Medicare scam. And Cuba continues to insist that the U.S. return five Cuban agents it says were wrongly convicted of spying in Miami.
But a former U.S. diplomat says better relations could give the FBI more freedom to go after the fugitives.
“In my time, we always got more of those kinds of people back from them when things were going a little better,” said Brookings Institution scholar Vicki Huddleston, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1999 to 2002.
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Cuba, and in some ways, the fugitives have become wanted Americans whom no one is after.
Cuba stopped giving new arrivals sanctuary in 2006, so far returning four Americans who recently had fled to avoid prosecution. But some famous ones are thought to remain, such as Victor Gerena, a Puerto Rican separatist. He is still on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” fugitive list for a 1983 armed robbery of an armored car company in Connecticut.
