Vol. 74/No. 14      April 12, 2010

Obama was referring to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died February 23 after refusing food for 80 days, and to Ladies in White, a U.S.-backed group in Cuba that opposes the revolution.

According to the Cuban daily Granma, between 1993 and 2002 Zapata was arrested several times on charges that had nothing to do with politics, ranging from fraud to battery and breaking and entering. At one point he was arrested for assault with a machete. In 2004 he began serving a three-year jail sentence; this was increased to 24 years after he physically attacked prison employees.

In December 2009, Zapata began a hunger strike, widely publicized in the capitalist news media as a fight for “human rights” in Cuba. The Cuban press, however, reported that Zapata’s main demands were “the installation of a telephone, cooking facilities, and a television in his cell.”  
 
No torture in Cuba
Cuban president Raúl Castro noted that the Cuban government tried to save Zapata’s life. “He was taken to our best hospitals,” Castro pointed out. “He died: we regret it very much.”

Since the 1959 revolution that overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, “we have not murdered anyone here, we have tortured no one here, we have not carried out any extra-judicial execution,” Castro explained. The same cannot be said about the U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Naval Base, the Cuban leader added, where “there have been tortures.”

Cuban television’s nightly news on March 1 included interviews with doctors who tried to save Zapata’s life. The report noted that family members and Cuban government and hospital personnel tried to convince Zapata to end his hunger strike, but not a single “dissident” group that had taken up his case did so.

Ladies in White stepped up its activities after Zapata’s suicide, including a series of provocative demonstrations in Havana that were met by counterprotests of supporters of the revolution. The group is made up of relatives of 75 opponents of the Cuban Revolution who were arrested in March 2003, 53 of them still in prison. The 75 were charged with receiving funds from Washington and collaborating with U.S. diplomatic personnel stationed in Havana against the Cuban Revolution.  
 
Washington financed opposition
They had been encouraged by James Cason, who was appointed in 2003 by then-president George Bush as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba. Cason publicly touted his “6,000-mile” plan to crisscross the island to aid groups opposed to the revolution.

Amnesty International, which continues to criticize Cuba for the arrests and public trials, admitted in a March 2008 report that the 75 had “received funds and/or materials from the United States government in order to engage in activities the authorities perceived as subversive and damaging to Cuba.”

While claiming that the Cuban government restricts “freedom of expression and association,” Amnesty International concedes that the Cuban government provides “all Cubans with key human rights such as access to housing, healthcare, and education.” Amnesty does not accuse Cuban authorities of torture, disappearances, or beatings.

“Solidarity” marches with Ladies in White took place in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles in late March. The largest took place in Miami, led by singer Gloria Estefan, a longtime opponent of the revolution. At a press conference, Estefan backed the hunger strike in Cuba begun by Guillermo Fariñas after Zapata’s death. Fariñas says he is refusing to eat to win the release of 26 prisoners.

In an autobiographical note posted on an anti-Cuba Web site, Fariñas says he fought in Angola in 1980 as part of the Cuban volunteer troops who helped defeat invasions by the South African apartheid regime.

In 1986, he says, he was a supporter of Perestroika and Glasnost in the Soviet Union. Fariñas also identifies himself as having opposed the execution of Arnaldo Ochoa in 1989. After it was discovered that he had been involved in drug trafficking, black market deals, and robbery, Ochoa, a general in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, was put on trial, found guilty, and given the death penalty.

For the last 50 years, Washington has used every means at its disposal to undermine and attack the Cuban Revolution. This has included scores of assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders, the economic embargo of Cuba, the backing of rightist groups that have launched violent attacks and bombings against Cuba, and the financing of small groups inside Cuba that falsely claim to be fighting for democratic rights.
 
 
Related articles:
Oppose slanders against Cuba
Victory of Cuban Revolution dealt major blow to racist discrimination
Two Cuban students speak to 350 at meetings in Georgia
‘Cuba and the Coming American Revolution’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home