My undertanding ( I dont know cassandra...) is that if you connect on the remote it works, then it has to do with the shell... when you say it works, if you disconnect from the remote and reconnect do you see the product still running?
But on the remote box did you not go and see in /var/log/cassandra if you have clues?
I wonder if it not something to do with your environment...
like not having JAVA_HOME set...
A good way of testing is to try to stra cassandra using cron on the remote, if it doesnt work then sure it is to do with your environment...