Today's guest post is from the blog, Crossing the Barbed Wire, by Luis
Felipe Rojas, a free and independent writer, journalist and poet from
the town of San German in Holguin, Cuba.
They Are Killing Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Black Cuban
The old saying that a lie always returns as a banner against the one who
told it came to pass, and this time not in favor of the current Cuban
regime.
The hoax that the revolutionary state of Fidel Castro ended racist
practices falls apart before the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a Cuban
political prisoner of the renowned Group of 75, arrested during the
Black Spring of 2003, in the days when the world's attention was
distracted by the American invasion of Iraq. Zapata was condemned to 25
years, and during the seven years he has been imprisoned he has been
summarily tried on several occasions so that with the time added he is
now sentenced to 47 years.
Now the authorities, acting together and in collusion with the courts
and the attorney general of the republic, have handed down a new
sentence that leaves him at 25 years again, but without credit for the
seven he has already served. This, among other reasons, is why today he
is on a hunger strike and is at the point of death in a room in the
Amalia Simoni Hospital in Camaguey.
But ... who is Zapata? Why has he been subjected to such torture? Why
should his punishment be so long?
Zapata Tamayo is a black Cuban and a front-line opponent of the Castro
dictatorship -- clear enough reasons for him to be punished. He is a
member of the illegal Alternative Republican Movement whose work focused
on taking to the streets and explaining person-to-person about the
atrocities of the Cuban military regime against its people. But for the
Cuban government, all black people, supposedly, ought to pay homage to
Fidel Castro, "the liberator of the black race, and the good master who
came to free us blacks." And that was exactly the lesson that Zapata did
not want to accept.
Since his incarceration he has led strong protests, which, although
peaceful, were intolerable to the prison authorities, and for this he
has suffered beatings, humiliation, prolonged solitary confinements, and
has since been subject to the maximum prison severity in his first phase.
Before being transferred on December 3, 2009 from the Holguin provincial
prison to another special regimen in the Kilo 8 prison in Camaguey he
was subjected to a huge beating. He told his mother during a brief visit
weeks after the punishment that they handcuffed him and beat him to
bring him down; they struck him with an iron bar on the knee where the
imprint is still visible. During the transfer he was stripped of his
cold-weather clothes, food, water purifying implements and other
utensils. Then they threw him in a punishment cell where he was kept
without food until he had to be taken urgently to the nearest hospital
where he was barely breathing.
On several occasions when they beat him, the guards yelled "black!" as
if it they were spitting out an insult. They want to bring him down, but
he is still standing proud of the color of his skin - he said- and firm
in his ideas about true justice, freedom, and respect for the right of
all Cubans to live a different life.
Yoani Sanchez: A Cuban Political Prisoner Nears Death, Is the World
Watching? (9 February 2010)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/a-cuban-political-prisone_b_454572.html
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