Death of dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo leads to clampdown in Cuba

[Jimmy2]

Cuban security forces rounded up political activists across the island yesterday to prevent protests at the funeral of a leading dissident who died after an 82-day hunger strike.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 42, a plumber and bricklayer declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, stopped eating solid food on December 3 to protest what he said were repeated beatings by guards at the Kilo 7 prison in the eastern province of Camagüey.

As his condition worsened last week, he was put on board an ambulance and driven to a clinic at the Combinado del Este prison in Havana where authorities administered fluids intravenously to try to keep him alive. He died on Tuesday after being moved again to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital, one of the best in Cuba.

“They have assassinated Orlando Zapata Tamayo. My son’s death has been a premeditated murder,” his mother, Reina Luisa Tamayo, told El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald.

“They managed to do what they wanted. They ended the life of a fighter for human rights.”

Mr Zapata’s death marks the first time in nearly 40 years that a Cuban activist has died on hunger strike to protest against government abuses. The last political prisoner to starve himself to death in Cuba was Pedro Luis Boitel, a poet and student leader, in 1972.

Raúl Castro, the Cuban President, issued an unprecedented statement expressing regret for the death of a dissident. “Raúl Castro laments the death of Cuban prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died after conducting a hunger strike,” he said.

That did not stop the Government cracking down on dissent. Elizardo Sánchez, spokesman for the outlawed Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said security forces had detained about 30 activists. “Some have also been held in their houses, without judicial warrant, to prevent people from going to the wake,” he said.

Mr Zapata’s death provoked an international outcry and a call from the son of one Cuban revolutionary hero for President Castro to resign.

“Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s death highlights the injustice of Cuba’s holding more than 200 political prisoners, who should now be released without delay,” the US State Department said.

Reaction in the Cuban community in Florida was fierce as exile radio stations ran interviews with Mr Zapata’s mother. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican Congressman from Florida, who is the nephew of Fidel Castro’s former wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, said that Mr Zapata’s “murder by the tyrant Fidel Castro and his cowardly jailers will never be forgotten”.

Inside Cuba, Mr Sánchez, the human rights activist, said that the death revealed the regime’s “totalitarian arrogance”.

Among those protesting was the son of the Cuban revolutionary hero Juan Almeida Bosque, who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the guerrilla uprising that brought down the dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Juan Juan**correct** Almeida García, who was briefly jailed in November, posted an open letter to Mr Castro on his daughter’s Facebook page urging him to resign as President.

“Doesn’t Zapata Tamayo’s death make you embarrassed?” he asked. “Must we go to such extremes? ... I beg of you to resign. Get out of this country. You don’t deserve respect.”

The official Cuban media did not report Mr Zapata’s death as the news spread by word of mouth. An exile group reported a heavier-than-usual police presence in several Cuban cities to head off protests sparked by his death.

Amnesty International called for a full investigation.

“Faced with a prolonged prison sentence, the fact that Orlando Zapata Tamayo felt he had no other avenue available to him but to starve himself in protest is a terrible indictment of the continuing repression of political dissidents in Cuba,” said Gerardo Ducos, Caribbean researcher for the group.

“With no independent judiciary in Cuba, trials are often summary and fall grossly short of international fair trial standards,” he added. “Once sentenced, the chances of appeal are virtually nil.”

Mr Zapata, a member of the “Alternative Republic Movement” opposed to Cuba’s one-party rule, had been temporarily detained several times — once for taking part in a human rights workshop in a Havana park — before he was jailed in a crackdown in 2003 in what became known as the “Black Spring”.

He was arrested while taking part in a hunger strike to demand the release of the dissident doctor Oscar Elías Biscet and other political prisoners.

He was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of “disrespect”, “public disorder” and “resistance”. By the time of his death he was serving a total of 36 years on additional charges of “disobedience” and “disorder in a penal establishment” because of continued acts of defiance behind bars.

Mr Zapata’s family said that they planned to take his body back to their hometown of Banes in the eastern province of Holguín.

His death threatened to overshadow a visit by President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who arrived in Havana on Tuesday night from the Rio Group Summit in Mexico accompanied by Raúl Castro.

Yesterday Mr Lula da Silva met the ailing Fidel Castro, now 83, who ceded power to his younger brother after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in 2006.

Fifty political prisoners had written to Mr Lula da Silva asking him to seek their freedom, highlighting Mr Zapata’s case in particular. The dissidents told the Brazilian leader that he could be “a magnificent interlocutor for getting the Cuban Government to decide to commit itself to urgently needed economic, political and social reforms, to move forward on respect for human rights, to achieve the desired [Cuban] national reconciliation and to bring the nation out of the deep crisis in which it finds itself”.

The leftist Brazilian leader, who has refused to meet dissidents on previous trips to the island, was unlikely to want to disrupt his push for greater investment and oil exploration by Brazilian companies in Cuba.

Dangerous times

• Cuba is among the world’s eight most-repressive regimes, according to the New York think-tank Freedom House

• The media is controlled by the state. Citizens were not allowed personal computers until 2008

• Those who speak out are often jailed for “dangerousness”

• In the “Black Spring” crackdown, 75 dissidents were jailed as US spies. Their spouses formed the Ladies in White protest group