Customer Reviews

Hijack

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book almost 20 years ago and it is still one of the most influential books I have ever read. The story is compelling and tells of what life is really like in socialist paradises. Useful idiots, like Mickey Moore, paint a picture of Cuba that is totally inaccurate. Bryant shatters the illusion that Cuba is anything but a tropical gulag where the human spirit suffers.

I heard Bryant speak at my university and it was very compelling. The campus Lefties shrieked in horror as Bryant told of what life was like in Cuba, both in and out of prison. Human rights in Guantanamo are much higher than what they are in the rest of Cuba, and that is not the story you will hear from the US media.

This is the story of how a deluded Black Panther attempted to live a doctrinaire revolutionary life and ended up seeing it for what it was. He said that it was always the goal of the BPs to destroy the US from the ballot box. Did they succeed?

Excellent! A FANTASTIC work by a survivor of the Back Panther party and the horrors of Castro's Police State. Any 'yuppies" out there who want to "normalize" relations with Cuba so they can get cigars NEED to read this absolutely spellbinding TRUE story!

This book is a TRUE Thriller! It Exposes the TRUTH about Fidel Castro and his "Workers Paradise" just 90 miles away! Anthony Bryant was a Black Panther and a communist revolutionary who HiJacked a plane to Havana . The Black Panther expected to find a Marxist Haven but was shocked to find himself TRAPPED Castro's hellish reality. READ it and WAKE UP to the TRUTH about Castro. An EXCELLENT source for any one interested in the 1960's and the Civil Rights movement!

This is one of the hardest hitting, truthful look at Cuba under Castro. The author, a member of the Black Panthers, starts on a journey with the brotherhood of the left and ends up after the most horrific experiences comming to see what socialism is all about.

Everyone who thinks Cuba under Castro, is a paradise of sunshine and government healthcare with plenty for all should read this book.

Some may say the Cold War prompted more psychological trauma than actual physical losses. I would agree that there was a considerable amount of psychological trauma inflicted on people, communities and society throughout the world but would disagree on the physical due to the overwhelming loss of life. Millions of lives were lost through out the world during the length of the Cold War that the US and Soviet Union started right after World War II. South America, Africa, Asia, Europe were all affected directly and some countries still bare the scars of neo-colonialism that the Cold War perpetuated. Todays war in Iraq, Afghanistan and US intervention in Libya are all direct results of the Cold War.

Hijack by Anthony Bryant is a compelling story of a man living in an extreme climate of repression during Americas "war" against anti-vietnam, civil and human right activist groups. The Black Panthers were considered "the most dangerous organization in America" by J.Edgar Hoover FBI director in the year that Bryant hijacked a plane from NY to Cuba, 1969.

Context is essential when trying to understand anyone or any story they may tell. This is where Anthony Bryant's Hijack falters. The story begins with the hijacking already taking place but the book never explains the motives and climate of the late 1960s nor the paranoia being created by the FBI's Cointelopro against the Black Panther Party. The Black panthers who were in January 1969 starting National Programs like Free Children's Breakfast, Free Clinics, Free Ambulances, Free Food and Clothe Drives and provided Free Pest Control and Elderly Citizen Protection was also well supported by White liberals and Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando as well as rockstars like MC5, John Lennon, Greatful Dead, Tina Turner and Santana to name a few. There is no mention of US repression towards radical groups in the US like John Sinclair's White Panther Party or Brown Berets or American Indian Movement. Instead Anthony Bryant creates a sense of Hollywood film context that can only exist through cinema. In other words, the book Hijack reads like a treatment for a screenplay. This isn't due to the compelling turn of events but the lack of information that is necessary to better understand Bryant's experience as part of the many consequences that took place during the Cold War. Bryant fails to really emphasize or acknowledge the facts for his imprisonment when he arrived in Cuba, 1969. Bryant fails to see his own stream of errors in robbing the passengers and not realizing this had nothing to do with liberating funds for a "revolution." Bryant could not understand that he was being processed in a non-US country where due process is going to be very different. Instead, Anthony Bryant seems to have had the misfortune of "reaction" first and misunderstanding later rather than fully comprehending what he was getting himself into in the first place. Ethics are excluded from Hijack for the sake of a compelling drama that walks the reader through years of voluntary anti-socialist, communist propaganda. This may not have been Bryant's story had he not accidently robbed a leading Cuban official while highjacking the NY to Miami bound plane in 1969. Anthony Bryant was accused of being a CIA spy by the Cuban Government much like the late William Lee Brent who was also a Black Panther who hijacked a plane in 1968 and also fled to Cuba, spent 2 years in a Cuban prison and finally wrote his autobiography in 1997. The difference is that William Lee Brent was not an idealist nor was he romanticizing a "revolution" or "communism." Lee Brent was also suspected of being a CIA spy and spent his time in a Cuban prison without trying to escape or giving the Cuban Government reason to think he was a spy. William Lee Brent spent the rest of his free life in Cuba serving the same humanitarian causes he served as a Black Panther in the US. The same can be said of Assata Shakur a former Black Panther who fled to Cuba and still lives there today. Neither Brent nor Shakur have used left winged propaganda to paint Cuba as a socialist paradise unlike Anthony Bryant who condemns the Cuban Government instead of scrutinizing his own actions or those of the country he fled in the first place. Hijack is packed with stories of the will to survive in a repressed environment, the prison system. It is unfortunate that Anthony Bryant went from one type of prison to another and back to another. Schitzophrenia often plays out in various ways in American society. The extremes Bryant lived through in 1960s America, 1970s Cuba and his return to the US in 1980 paralyzed his ability for a clear perspective since he never actually experienced Cuba outside of its prison system. There is no balance, no ying or yang in the book Highjack. It is only reactionary and right winged propaganda driven unlike Assata by Assata Shakur or William Lee Brent's Long Time Gone or even Eldridge Cleaver's writings in Target Zero, critically analyzing his one year exile in Cuba. Anthony Bryant's writing of Hijack was written during the height of Ronald Reagan 1980s "Star Wars" era and the US Right Wing need to produce more examples of disillusioned left wing "extremists" to validate its own causes and propaganda. Hijack is an example of the cold wars polarizing effect on the left and the right minus winners.