Black Panther William Lee Brent, 75

Wearing a conservative suit and tie, he boarded TWA flight 154 in Oakland on the morning of June 17, 1969. The flight had originated in San Francisco and was scheduled to fly nonstop to New York.

Somewhere over Nevada, he told a flight attendant that he was hijacking the airplane. In the cockpit, he held a .38-caliber revolver to the head of the pilot, who calmly announced to the 76 passengers, "We have had a change of plans. We are going to Havana." It was the 28th hijacking of the year.

When the plane touched down in Havana, Mr. Brent expected to be greeted as a hero. Instead, he was put in a Cuban jail for 22 months as authorities sought to learn whether he was a spy. He later cut sugar cane and worked in a soap factory and on a hog farm. He married an American journalist living in Cuba, Jane McManus, and enrolled at the University of Havana, from which he graduated in 1981. (McManus died last year.)

Mr. Brent was part of a circle of other American political emigres in Havana and led a somewhat privileged life by Cuban standards, with a spacious apartment overlooking the Almendares River. He taught English at Havana's leading high school and became a disc jockey under the name Bill Beaumont -- after his onetime childhood home in Texas -- on Cuban radio.

While visiting Havana, Steve Wasserman, an editor with Times Books, urged Mr. Brent to write his memoirs, which were published to warm reviews in 1996.

"It was one of the great experiences I ever had as an editor, to watch this man whose life was chaotic and unruly obtain mastery over his own story by writing it in his own hand," Wasserman said in an interview.

Mr. Brent did not return to the United States because there is no statute of limitations for skyjacking. No one in his family visited him, and his isolation began to wear on him. He said he also recognized the false hope engendered by Fidel Castro's revolution, as life on the island grew ever more straitened.

"Bill refused to lie," Wasserman said. "He was certainly an unrepentant and radically minded guy, but he was not a man who liked to live in an illusion."

Without renouncing his radical fervor or the crimes and missteps that led to his exile, Mr. Brent admitted in 1996 that he missed "my people, the struggle, the body language" of America.

"You can't get rid of what you are, what you grew up in, the way you were formed."