Three Black Panthers and a baby in North Korea

• Angela Davis: A Panther Among Sharks

At its core and in essence, the story of the Black Panthers in North Korea could be told as a

Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton were to share the roles of Juno, Hercules and Jupiter, bent on jealousy and self-destruction despite using a discourse of emancipation and freedom.

The proof is in a text that Kathleen Cleaver wrote after the 1989 murder of Huey Newton in

.

There, the activist recalled the circumstances in which she met Newton.

Kathleen, at that time, was the madly in love girlfriend of Eldridge Cleaver,

in his fight against the world.

A perfect alpha male whose life changed when he crossed paths with Huey Newton, whom Kathleen describes as

.

Not as strong as Eldridge but famous for his prowess in physical fighting, Newton was far more sophisticated intellectually.

He was also charming and refined in treatment, and had "smooth skin and almost red hair" that made him unmistakable ... Eldridge and Newton were the best companions in the heyday of the Black Panther Party.

Later they became mortal enemies.

It is not difficult to intuit

.

Kathleen, who married Eldridge and later separated from him but defended her figure even in the most embarrassing moments, maintains that their fight was

.

He may be right or it may be typical '70s paranoia.

Summer in Korea

Half a century ago now, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, their son Maceo, their colleague Elaine Brown, and five other American revolutionaries spent the summer in Pyongiang, on

.

The Black Panthers came from Algeria, the country that had taken in 24 of its members when Cuba had gotten rid of them.

In Algiers, the Black Panthers had been received as

, but their position was complex.

The Cleavers, already faced with the official line of the Black Panthers, had no more power than kings in exile.

They were far from their battlefield and had no clear funding channels.

The Algerian National Liberation Front had given them diplomatic status and given them the former villa of an

escaped

as their headquarters, but the Panthers did not fit into the city's way of life.

Cleaver and company, scandalous and womanizing, were causing trouble in a country torn between Muslim piety and revolutionary austerity.

There is more: Elaine Mokhtefi, the American then employed by the Algerian government as an interlocutor of the Panthers, tells in her memoirs,

, that Eldridge Cleaver was the main suspect in the never-clarified murder of two black panthers in Algiers .

A matter of jealousy, explains Mokhtefi.

There is nothing strange about this suspicion: Cleaver was a convicted and confessed rapist in his memoirs,

and on several occasions he referred to the role of revolutionary women as that of the necessary sexual relief of warriors.

"Pussy power" was the phrase he used on those occasions.

That does not mean that Cleaver was stupid or that he was ignorant of the impasse he had entered in around 1969. Huey Newman, after spending four years in jail, had gone out on the streets and taken over the leadership of the party.

With Newman, the Black Panthers began a

to which Cleaver referred to with contempt: "Babylon is quiet, the pigs breathe. Why? Because the Black Panthers are dedicated to giving breakfast to children instead of wielding whores weapons".

What could that Black Panther Party do in exile?

In search of a role to play, Cleaver played the card of internationalization of the fight.

The activist, a dissident among dissidents, decided to sell his charisma to the revolutionary states in the world that could pay him.

In 1969 he gave a first tour of Asia.

He was in China and North Vietnam, where he did radio (he encouraged black American soldiers to turn their guns on their officers), and then came to North Korea to speak at an anti-imperialist journalism conference.

That first trip was a first contact.

Back in Algeria, the Pyongiang ambassador invited the Cleavers to an official dinner where he encouraged them to pay a longer visit.

The delegation arrived in North Korea in June 1970. Kathleen, pregnant, was sent to a lake-side house in Changsuwon, a rest resort for North Korean elites.

Meanwhile, Eldridge and Elaine Brown toured the country or, rather,

The trip had a bittersweet taste.

Eldridge and Elaine were given to be the speakers of the North Korean propaganda.

Elaine called North Korea "the socialist paradise," and Eldridge explained that he embraced the

ideology

, the North Korean interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.

Was there cynicism in his words?

Elaine Brown may have been

in idealizing the seeming prosperity and neatness of the stage that passed before her eyes.

However, Elgridge did play the role of an accommodating and flattering guest.

Later, in his memoirs, he complained about the impersonal treatment of North Korean officials, noted the discomfort caused by his attitude of

and regretted that he was never received by Kim Il Sung.

Some high-level leaders dispatched with him, but the beloved leader eluded the Panthers.

Meanwhile, Kathleen had in her retirement from Changsuwon her second daughter,

, who is today a university professor, like her mother and whose passport says "Birthplace: North Korea."

All of this happened in the summer of 1970. A year later, North Korean interest in the Black Panthers came to naught.

By then Eldridge Cleaver had already lost the fratricidal fight with Huey Newton and had become an outcast within anti-imperialism: a madman, a murderer, a danger to himself.

Furthermore, the cold war cycle had entered a moment of relaxation.

Nixon had come to China, and even North Korea that summer was careful to offer the world a less hostile image.

The Black Panther group of dissidents slammed the door out of Algiers and dispersed around the world.

Elaine Brown reconciled with Newton and ended up leading the party in

, when he acted as a

within the Democratic Party.

The Cleavers passed through France and returned to the United States in 1975. Eldridge was in jail.

When he came out, he announced a new faith, the

, of which he was the prophet.

A small paramilitary army escorted him like a grotesque replica of the Black Panthers.

He died hallucinated by crack and heroin.

Newton was murdered in a confusing episode by a drug dealer who may have been a member of a radical group.

Only

could be saved.

She divorced Eldridge, went back to school at Yale, and started a new life long enough to celebrate her North Korean daughter's 50th birthday.

He once wrote his memoirs but today they are unfindable.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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