Assata Shakur, the Black revolutionary once known as JoAnne Chesimard who found decades-long sanctuary in Cuba after escaping from a New Jersey prison where she was serving a life sentence in the 1973 shooting death of a state trooper, died on Thursday in Havana. She was 78.

Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death without specifying a cause, citing only “health conditions and advanced age.”

Assata Shakur was both lionized and demonized long after she and the Black Liberation Army, the militant group she had embraced, faded from broad public consciousness. To supporters she was a tireless battler against racial oppression. To detractors she was a stone-cold cop killer, the first woman to land on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted terrorists” list, with $2 million in state and federal money offered for her capture.

For her part, Ms. Shakur regarded herself as “a 20th-century escaped slave.”

In the early 1970s, an era of American ferment on multiple fronts, Ms. Shakur channeled her radicalism through the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist organization that had broken away from the Black Panthers. Its members planted bombs, killed police officers and carried out robberies that they described as “expropriations.”

Ms. Shakur herself was indicted 10 times by federal and state authorities in New York and New Jersey on charges of murder, robbery and kidnapping. All but one of those cases ended in acquittals, dismissals or hung juries. The lone exception began with a car ride in the early morning of May 2, 1973.

She and two colleagues were in a beat-up Pontiac when New Jersey state troopers stopped them on the New Jersey Turnpike for having a broken taillight. The police account was that she and the others left the car with guns blazing. She fired first, they said, touching off a shootout in which a state trooper, Werner Foerster, was killed and another, James Harper, was wounded. One of Ms. Shakur’s companions, James Costan, was also wounded and died later. She, too, was shot, in the left shoulder and the underside of her right arm.

Soon captured, she was not put on trial until 1977 because, while in a holding cell with a man named Fred Hilton in an unrelated Bronx robbery case, she had become pregnant.

Ms. Shakur’s version was that she never held a gun on that 1973 morning and that her arms were in the air when she was shot. Her lawyers said she was mistreated in jail and given poor medical care. Doctors testified on her behalf that the wounds supported her claim that her arms had been raised.

Nonetheless, prosecutors insisted that, when shot, she was in a crouch and firing at Trooper Harper. In the end, an all-white jury of seven women and five men believed them. Though there was no evidence that she had fired at the slain Trooper Foerster, everyone involved in the killing of a police officer was deemed equally responsible under New Jersey law.

In March 1977, the jurors swiftly found her guilty of first-degree murder and assault. She was sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years.

She did not remain behind bars for long.

On Nov. 2, 1979, three armed men from the Black Liberation Army broke her out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, a penitentiary in western New Jersey now named for Edna Mahan, a prison superintendent. Using false identification, and apparently not having been searched for weapons, her colleagues were able to free her, taking two guards hostage and commandeering a van. The hostages were later released unharmed.

In an unrelated case eight years later, one of the men who had helped her escape, Tyrone Rison, testified that Ms. Shakur was taken to a “safe house” in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and then to an apartment in East Orange, N.J., followed by stops in Pittsburgh and the Bahamas. She arrived in Cuba in 1984 and was granted asylum.

There she stayed, getting by with money from the government while teaching, writing poetry and studying. Despite being labeled a terrorist by the F.B.I., and despite the $2 million bounty on her head, she remained beyond the reach of American authorities, all the while professing her innocence.

In 1988, Ms. Shakur published an autobiography, “Assata,” a name she had assumed in 1971, forsaking what she called her “slave name.” The book was replete with spellings and locutions that were standard in radical circles, like references to America as “amerika” and to the police as “pigs.” She routinely used a lowercase “i” as a first-person pronoun — to “take away from the egotistical connotation of the word,” she said.

As for her name, she wrote: “It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman.”

And so she became a Muslim named Assata Olugbala Shakur (Assata derived from an Arabic name meaning “she who struggles,” Olugbala from a Yoruba word for “savior” and Shakur from the Arabic “thankful one”). She regarded herself as a godmother to the rapper Tupac Shakur, who was shot to death in 1996 when he was 25.

To many Black people she was a folk hero. Several rap artists name-checked her or even devoted entire songs to her. In “Rebel Without a Pause,” Public Enemy sang, “Hard, my calling card/Recorded and ordered, supporter of Chesimard.” In “A Song for Assata,” Common wrote in part, “Shot twice with hands up/Police questioned but shot before she answered.”

At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which Ms. Shakur once attended, a scholarship bore her name for several years. At the City College of New York, another school she attended, students named a community and student center for her and for Guillermo Morales, a Puerto Rican nationalist who was implicated in many bombings and who also found refuge in Cuba. A 2005 resolution in the New York City Council urged clemency for her, but it did not pass.

In Cuba, Ms. Shakur gave few interviews. She was described as being wary of strangers, concerned that such contact — not to mention the reward money — might lead to her being taken captive and returned to a prison cell in the United States.

Her survivors include Kakuya Shakur, her daughter with Fred Hilton.

The woman who became Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Queens on July 16, 1947. Her father, Carl Byron, was an accountant; her mother, Doris Johnson, was a schoolteacher. They divorced soon after their daughter was born. Part of JoAnne’s girlhood was spent shuttling between New York and North Carolina, where she lived with her maternal grandparents.

“All of my family tried to instill in me a sense of personal dignity,” Ms. Shakur wrote in her autobiography, “but my grandmother and my grandfather were really fanatic about it. Over and over they would tell me, ‘You’re as good as anyone else. Don’t let anybody tell you that they’re better than you.”

Her teenage years were troubled, and, she acknowledged, her temper was “terrible.” At 17, she dropped out of a Roman Catholic high school, took several jobs that didn’t last and finally attended night classes to get a diploma. At 21, she married a man named Louis Chesimard, and though their union ended after a year, the surname endured. She attended City College from 1968 to 1971 but did not graduate.

By then, her radicalism was in full bloom, first with the Black Panthers and then with the Black Liberation Army, a group that had basically fallen apart by the 1980s.

“I feel I’ve been a victim of America,” Ms. Shakur told a Newsday reporter who interviewed her in Cuba in 1987.

“If I owe allegiance to anything,” she said, “it is my ancestors, especially the ones who came over the slave ship. I feel I am answerable to them. I want to be able to say I tried, and that I tried to stand on this earth proud.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.