Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was given political asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a U.S. prison where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a police officer, has died, her daughter and the Cuban government said.

Shakur, who was born Joanne Deborah Chesimard, died Thursday in the capital city of Havana due to “health conditions and advanced age,” Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Shakur’s daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed her mother’s death in a Facebook post.

Officials in New Jersey, where Shakur had been arrested, convicted and imprisoned, said she was 78.

A member of Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, Shakur’s case had long been emblematic of the fraught relations between the U.S. and Cuba. American authorities, including President Donald Trump during his first term, demanded her return from the communist nation for decades.

The FBI put Shakur on its list of ” most wanted terrorists,” but, in her telling — and in the minds of her supporters — she was pursued for crimes she didn’t commit or that were justified.

On May 2, 1973, Shakur and two others were pulled over by New Jersey State Police troopers because the car they were driving had a broken taillight.

A gunfight ensued and one of the troopers, Werner Foerster, was killed and another was wounded. One of Shakur’s companions was also killed.

The New York City native fled but was eventually apprehended. She was found guilty of murder, armed robbery and other crimes in 1977 and was sentenced to life in prison. Shakur was charged with additional bank robberies and in the nonfatal shootings of two other police officers, but most of those charges were dismissed or resulted in her acquittal.

Shakur’s prison stint was short-lived, though. In November 1979, members of the Black Liberation Army, posing as visitors, stormed the Clinton Correctional Facility for women, took two guards hostage and commandeered a prison van to break her out.

Shakur disappeared before eventually emerging in 1984 in Cuba, where Fidel Castro granted her asylum.

Offering Shakur safe harbor was one of the most famous examples of Cuba aligning itself with what it describes as revolutionary forces struggling against the oppressive capitalist empire to the north.

Much like Cuba supported anti-colonial and left-wing forces in Africa, Central and South America, the Cuban government saw the armed Black liberation movement in the U.S. as part of a global revolutionary struggle.

Rapper Common told Shakur’s story in his 2000 song “A Song for Assata.” The Grammy award-winner’s invitation to a White House poetry event in 2011, during the Obama administration, drew outrage from conservatives and law enforcement groups who felt it was disrespectful to Foerster’s family and police officers broadly.