Parallel Deaths: Orlando Zapata Tamayo & Bobby Sands

Orlando Zapata & Bobby Sands










"Tyrants tremble when they are faced with men who are willing to die for their ideas. After 60 days on a hunger strike, following the example of Christ's 3 days on Calvary which for centuries has been a symbol of human sacrifice, it is time to put an end to this disgusting atrocity through denunciations and pressure by the world community."*

Fidel Castro (on Irish hunger strikers Bobby Sands et al) 68th Inter-Parliamentary Union Conference September 15, 1981

On the face of it their lives could not have been more different. Other than being born on an island and the way they died their lives should be a study in contrasts. One was a nationalist and socialist revolutionary who embraced an armed struggle against his oppressor and died on hunger strike demanding that his status as a political prisoner be recognized while the other an advocate of non-violent civic resistance to oppression and human rights activist would die on hunger strike demanding that his status as a prisoner of conscience be recognized and that prison conditions be improved. Although their methods of struggle while out on the street where extremely different within their respective prisons suffering beatings, and numerous indignities both sought to highlight the injustice they were suffering by means of a non-violent tactic: the hunger strike. Others have asked the question: what would you die for? They gave the world an answer that make tyrants tremble: Freedom.

Bobby Sands (pictured above far left) photo from Bobby Sands Trust

Bobby Sands
Robert Gerard Sands born on March 9, 1954 in Rathcoole, a predominantly loyalist district of north Belfast in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands at 16 years old was an apprentice coach builder but two years later he was intimidated by men with guns out of his apprenticeship and then four years later in June of 1972 he and his family were intimidated out of their home. At the age of 18 he joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and by October of 1972 Bobby was arrested and guns were found in his possession. He would spend three years in prison with political prisoner status released in 1976 he returned to his unit and continued to wage war on the British. Six months later arrested again in a car with a revolver with three other young men near the scene of a bomb attack on the the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurry, followed by a gun-battle.



Within six months Bobby was arrested again. There had been a bomb attack on the Balmoral Furniture Company at Dunmurry, followed by a gun-battle in which two men were wounded. Although judge admitted no evidence to link the men with the bombing the four were sentenced to 14 years each for possession of the one revolver. He continued his struggle behind bars writing articles for opposition newspapers smuggling the handwritten articles and letters out on tiny pieces of toilet paper. A short excerpt reproduced here:

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution. That is why I am incarcerated, naked and tortured.

The British sought to treat the Irish Republicans and their violent struggle as a criminal matter ignoring the political dimension and stopped recognizing them as political prisoners. Add to that beatings and poor living conditions and the stage was set for the hunger strike. Bobby insisted on starting two weeks ahead of the others so that his death might secure their demands and save the others lives.



During the first 17-days of the hunger strike he kept a secret diary written on toilet paper in biro pen. On March 23rd he was moved to the prison hospital. On March 30th Bobby was nominated as candidate for UK parliament and won the seat on 9 April 1981, with 30,493 votes to 29,046. At 1.17 a.m. on Tuesday, May 5th, having completed sixty-five days on hunger-strike, Bobby Sands MP, died in the H-Block prison hospital at Long Kesh.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo

Orlando Zapata Tamayo born in Santiago, Cuba in 1967 was by vocation a brick layer and he was also a human rights activist, a member of the Movimiento Alternativa Republicana, Alternative Republican Movement, and of the Consejo Nacional de Resistencia Cívica, National Civic Resistance Committee. He had gathered signatures for the Varela Project, a citizen initiative to amend the Cuban constitution using legal means with the aim of bringing it in line with international human rights standards.

Amnesty International had documented how Orlando had been arrested several times in the past. For example he was temporarily detained on 3 July 2002 and 28 October 2002. In November of 2002 after taking part in a workshop on human rights in the central Havana park, José Martí, he and eight other government opponents were arrested and later released. He was also arrested on December 6, 2002 along with fellow prisoners of conscience Oscar Elías Biscet and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo. Dr. Biscet just released from prison a month earlier had sought to form a grassroots project for the promotion of human rights called "Friends of Human Rights." State security prevented them from entering the home of Raúl Arencibia Fajardo, Oscar Biscet, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes and 12 others held a sit-in in the street in protest and chanted "long live human rights" and "freedom for political prisoners." They were then arrested and taken to the Tenth Unit of the National Revolutionary Police, Décima Unidad de La Policía Nacional Revolucionaria (PNR), in Havana.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was released three months later on March 8, 2003, but Oscar Elias Biscet, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo remained imprisoned.

On the morning of March 20, 2003 whilst taking part in a fast at the Fundación Jesús Yánez Pelletier, Jesús Yánez Pelletier Foundation, in Havana, to demand the release of Oscar Biscet and the other political prisoners. Orlando was taken to the Villa Marista State Security Headquarters. He was moved around several prisons, including Quivicán Prison, Guanajay Prison, and Combinado del Este Prison in Havana. Where according to Amnesty International on October 20, 2003 Orlando was dragged along the floor of Combinado del Este Prison by prison officials after requesting medical attention, leaving his back full of lacerations. Orlando managed to smuggle a letter out following a brutal beating it was published in April of 2004:

My dear brothers in the internal opposition in Cuba. I have many things to say to you, but I did not want to do it with paper and ink, because I hope to go to you one day when our country is free without the Castro dictatorship. Long live human rights, with my blood I wrote to you so that this be saved as evidence of the savagery we are subjected to...

On May 18, 2004 Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo were each sentenced to three years in prison for contempt for authority, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in a one-day trial. Orlando Zapata Tamayo would continue his rebelliousness and his non-violent resistance posture while in prison and suffer numerous beatings and new charges of disobedience and disrespect leading to decades added to his prison sentence in eight additional trials.

He began is hunger strike on December 3, 2009 refusing to wear the uniform of a common prisoner and because his books and food were confiscated when he was transferred as punishment to Kilo 8 prison in Camaguey. Never for one moment were demands responded to by either his jailers or the political police. During the water only hunger strike in an effort to break his spirit officials denied him water for more than two weeks. He was also taken to Amalia Simoni and left exposed in a room with the air conditioning set very cold which produced a pneumonia which worsened his already critical condition. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died 82 days later on February 23, 2010.

During this process they attempted to keep family and relatives away from Orlando Zapata Tamayo and officials also secretly video taped his relatives when they met with doctors to later broadcast edited footage on official television and prepare a narrative to justify the death of Orlando. Finally to add insult to injury officials of the Cuban dictatorship have slandered Orlando Zapata Tamayo's name in death while having to cover up their own past recognition of him as a dissident in the dictatorship's own published book: "Los disidentes" by Luis Báez and Rosa Miriam Elizalde made public on June 24, 2003 where Orlando Zapata Tamayo appears in a number of photos with prominent members of the opposition. On March 4, 2010 speaking from his prison cell Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet sought to set the record straight on Orlando Zapata Tamayo.

Zapata Tamayo was a man of the nonviolent civic struggle in its theoretical & practical aspects and expressed his heroic courage and intelligence - the most difficult in non-violent resistance in his direct action - the hunger strike until the death to achieve his objectives of basic freedoms. ... Zapata Tamayo had to suffer a double portion of this cruel discrimination for his humanitarian ideas and for being a person of color. ..."The government of Raul Castro exacerbated all its hatred, racial discrimination & torture until his death. This death is nothing less than an extrajudicial killing

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Raúl Arencibia Fajardo now out of prison angrily denounced the government slanders of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a day after he heard the Cuban dictatorship's foreign minister libel the now deceased prisoner of conscience.

"I feel outraged by the lies of the Cuban foreign minister in Geneva and I am here to expose his lies. I knew Orlando Zapata for a long time in Cuba and I participated with him in many political activities...

The rest of the statement in Spanish is available in the video below:

Behind bars and faced with an assault on their dignity both men resorted to a civic nonviolent tactic - the hunger strike to defend their rights and expose injustice while demanding freedom. Bobby Sands writing in his Prison Diary on day 17 of his hunger strike stated it simply and powerfully: "If they aren’t able to destroy the desire for freedom, they won’t break you. They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart."

Sadly, the non-violent spirit of the hunger strike did not spread into the rest of the IRA movement and riots would eventually break out again in Northern Ireland which British forces were able to crush but for a period of time the hunger strikers forced the world to take notice at what was taking place inside of the prisons. In the Cuban struggle the opposition on the island has taken the decision to carry out a non-violent struggle. The Ladies in White, mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives have taken to the street and despite being brutalized, beaten, and bones broken continued to march for seven days during the Cuban Black Spring anniversary. It is a good sign that the opposition has the discipline and the toughness to stick to nonviolence and that is bad news for the dictatorship and good news for the Cuban people.

*By the time that the dictator made the above statement at least three men had died on hunger strike protesting the cruel and inhumane situation in the prisons and in the country their names and dates of their deaths: Carmelo Cuadra Hernández on April 21, 1969, Pedro Luis Boitel Abraham on May 25, 1972, Olegario Charlot Espileta on January 15, 1973

Che Guevara as seen through Irish Eyes

Che Guevara as seen through Irish Eyes
Back in August of 2009 I posted the following entry: Guevara's Lamentable Legacy which took a look at Guevara's philosophy and its impact in Latin America:Guevara’s call to action in a hemisphere with too many military juntas led to new military juntas in countries that had not known them before in their history: Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, and Uruguay all had their longest running military juntas in the twentieth century after Castro's regime began exporting guerrillas and Guevara's ideology outlined in Guevara’s Message to the Tricontinental. Other countries such as Chile, who had known a military junta between 1924 and 1931, in reaction to communist threats embraced Augusto Pinochet in 1973 who remained in power for seventeen years. With the exception of Nicaragua Che Guevara’s prescription for revolution in Latin America led to a generation of military dictatorships and harsh repression. In Nicaragua it led to a Marxist dictatorship and civil war.


Now from Dublin, Ireland Eilis O'Hanlon takes a look at Che's legacy in Europe (I reproduce it in its entirety below):

Che's bloody legacy flows on in dissident and republican alike

When are we ever going to stop this adolescent idolization of fanatical gunmen?

Sunday September 13, 2009

THE 600lb bomb that was defused along the border last week was twice as large as the one which killed 29 people in Omagh 10 years ago. It was also the third significant attack thwarted by security forces this year alone. But then terrorists, as always, work on the principle that they only have to get lucky once. And get lucky they will.

Conor Murphy is the Sinn Fein MP for the area in which the bomb was found. His response was swift: "I challenge those who planted this bomb to explain why they have done so." It didn't, Murphy insisted, bring Irish unification one step closer.

Then again, nor did the Provisional IRA campaign, and Sinn Fein were not outraged by that. On the contrary, they're still making a packet by flogging souvenirs extolling the virtues of that particular band of murderers in their stores and on their websites. Dissidents could be forgiven for asking what's the big difference.

So some republicans no longer think killing people will bring about Irish unity, and some of them still think it's worth a shot. It's just quibbling over details really. Especially when Gerry Adams himself is appearing in a documentary film called Chevolution, made by one of his close friends and launched last week, which tracks the influence of that famous poster image of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.

According to the Sinn Fein president, Che was one of the inspirations for the Northern Irish civil rights movement, adding: "I suppose people from my background were drawn to that image because of what Che Guevara represented."

Bearded man of violence inspires millions of devoted followers: now why on earth would Gerry find that such a pleasing thought?

The irony will be lost on Sinn Fein, because they don't generally do irony, but also it must have crossed their minds at some point that there is something more than a little contradictory about lecturing dissident republicans on the futility of violence whilst simultaneously lauding a man with such bloodied hands as Ernesto Guevara.

Che was a brilliant soldier and tactician, and a good writer, and an undoubtedly charismatic individual who inspired devotion amongst many who met him. But really, when are we ever going to stop this adolescent idolisation of fanatical gunmen? Che Guevara was also a ruthless killer, who had no qualms about dispensing what he called "revolutionary justice" to those who weren't as enthusiastic about his political ambitions as he was, and whose legacy to Latin America was rivers of blood spilled by his disciples.

By any psychiatric standards, Che Guevara was as mad as a box of frogs -- or maybe that should be a Bay of Pigs. During the Cuban missile crisis, Che was furious that the Russians withdrew their nuclear warheads from Cuban soil. He later told a reporter that he had been ready to fire them all at the United States. What are the deaths of hundreds of thousands to the man of principle, as long as it advances his revolutionary aims?

That some of those dead hordes would include the Cubans for whose liberation he claimed to have fought was obviously an irrelevance. You free them from the shackles of imperialism one day and then let them fry the next: it's the Marxist way.

Far from being a noble inspiration, Che Guevara's crazed dreams of nuclear obliteration find their closest parallel in the psychology of serial killer Peter Kuerten, the so-called Vampire of Dusseldorf, who raped and murdered men, women and children alike in a pathological frenzy which he insisted was his attempt to "strike back at oppressive society", whilst becoming sexually excited by car crashes and fantasising about destroying entire cities.

But intellectuals and movie stars and pop singers who would be horrified by Kuerten gladly worship at the altar of a man who made the Vampire of Dusseldorf look like an amateur in the business of slaughter. Jean Paul Sartre, who, like all French geniuses, made a habit of saying remarkably stupid things, even called him "the most complete human being of our age". It's the terrorist as Renaissance Man again. No wonder Gerry Adams jumps on the bandwagon so willingly. Middle class left-wingers get off on the iconography. Che, handsome brute that he is, is their political bit of rough. For the men, it all gets a bit homoerotic.

Che's legacy lives on in, amongst other places, Greece, where a group calling itself Revolutionary Struggle had claimed responsibility for the recent bombing of the Athens stock exchange, and issued
a statement threatening to extend the campaign of violence to all "big shareholders, golden boys and capitalists" -- and in Al Qaeda, three of whose members were found guilty last week of plotting to blow up transatlantic flights from Heathrow.

It also lives on in the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, and in Oglaigh na hEireann, the splinter group of a splinter group which is believed to have been behind the latest attempt at carnage. Che can't simply be claimed by those nice, respectable republicans whose past Guevara-tinged bursts of revolutionary justice are supposed to be all forgiven and forgotten now. Che Guevara certainly wouldn't disown the dissidents so hypocritically. The blood of the Irish rebels flowed in him, and his spirit flows in them. Hearing Gerry Adams joining the fan club surely only makes the dissidents more convinced that they were right all along.

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/ches-bloody-legacy-flows-on-in-dissident-and-republican-alike-1885256.html