How Castro killed Orlando Zapata Tamayo and then sought to obliterate his memory.

"Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me." - Martin Luther King Jr. (1958)

Recovering facts from the memory hole
Orlando Zapata Tamayo was tortured from 2003 until his death on February 23, 2010 but following his death the Castro regime continued the campaign to obliterate his memory in death. The Cuban dictatorship and their agents of influence continue to employee these tactics today. What was done to Orlando should be a cautionary tale to all who want to give Raul Castro, and his dictatorship, the benefit of the doubt.

Orlando's mom, Reina Luisa Tamayo, holds up son's bloodied shirt

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was moved around several prisons, including Quivicán Prison, Guanajay Prison, and Combinado del Este Prison in Havana. Amnesty International reported that on October 20, 2003 Orlando "was dragged along the floor of the Combinado del Este Prison by prison officials after he requested medical attention, leaving his back full of lacerations." Orlando managed to smuggle a letter out following a brutal beating that was published by Cubanet 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 that are victims of the Pedro Luis Boitel political prisoners [movement]."*

This type of mistreatment went on for years. Orlando Zapata Tamayo was pushed into undergoing hunger strikes as a last measure to try to save his own life, and dignity as a human being.

Orlando began his last hunger strike on December 3, 2009 refusing to wear the uniform of a common prisoner. His books and food had been confiscated when he was transferred as punishment to Kilo 8 prison in Camagüey. 

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 the Amalia Simoni Hospital and left exposed in a room with the air conditioning set very cold which caused him to contract pneumonia which worsened his already critical condition. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died 82 days later on February 23, 2010.

Orlando died after seven years of beatings, torture and lengthening prison terms for continuing his human rights activism while imprisoned. The dictatorship than began its systematic aim to obliterate and denigrate him.

Cuban human rights defender and martyr Orlando Zapata Tamayo

Trivializing the aim of his hunger strike
The Castro regime's official media misrepresented what Orlando Zapata Tamayo had demanded claiming that he had died for: “a television, a personal kitchen, and a cell phone to call his family in order to end his hunger strike and regime sympathizers without citing the source repeat the claim.”^1,2

Cuban political prisoner Abel Lopez Perez on December 3, 2009 was transferred to the same prison in Camaguey where Orlando Zapata Tamayo.  Abel briefly saw him and heard from other prisoners “that a few days before being taken away, Zapata stood up and shouted, ‘People, don’t let yourselves be lied to. Don’t believe anything that they tell you. I’m not demanding a kitchen or any of the things they took away from me. I’m demanding an improvement of treatment for all prisoners, and so you all know, I am going to die for it.’”³

When weighing the claims of the Castro regime, the official media, and agents of influence against a former Cuban political prisoner one should look at Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s background. This is a man who was arrested while on a hunger strike protesting the imprisonment of other prisoners of conscience who had been arrested with him in a December 2002 sit-in just days after he himself was released from prison in March of 2003. This fact, along with the rest of Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s trajectory as an activist would give more weight to Abel Lopez’s version of events than the dictatorship's.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo photographed with prominent Cuban dissidents.

Claimed that Orlando Zapata Tamayo was not a dissident despite having claimed so in the past

The Castro regime claimed that he was a common criminal and that he had never been a Cuban dissident. This necessitated ignoring that Orlando Zapata Tamayo had appeared photographed in the Cuban government’s own publication Los Disidentes, in photos prior to his 2003 arrest where he was recognized by officials as a dissident. The Spanish newspaper El Mundo carried a photo the day after the Cuban regime announced the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo with prominent Cuban dissidents. On January 29, 2004 Amnesty International outlined Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s past arrests:

“He has been arrested several times in the past. For example he was temporarily detained on 3 July 2002 and 28 October 2002. In November 2002 after taking part in a workshop on human rights in the central Havana park, José Martí, he and eight other government opponents were reportedly arrested and later released. He was also arrested on 6 December 2002 along with Oscar Elías Biscet, but was released on 8 March 2003. Most recently, he was arrested on the morning of 20 March 2003 whilst taking part in a hunger strike at the Fundación Jesús Yánez Pelletier, Jesús Yánez Pelletier Foundation, in Havana, to demand the release of Oscar Biscet and other political prisoners.”⁴

Orlando Zapata Tamayo: Before and after

Orlando Zapata Tamayo was murdered

Both Abel Lopez Perez and Reina Luisa Tamayo (Orlando's mother) charge that Cuban prison officials denied Orlando Zapata Tamayo water in an effort to break him. Reina Luisa Tamayo in an interview with Yoani Sanchez, hours after her son’s death denounced that officials had denied him water.⁵

Abel Lopez corroborates the charge describing what went on: “Before Zapata was checked into the hospital, he was regularly taking some vitamins. He was in a weak state of health. A military chief known as ‘Gordo’, who was the one responsible for ordering all of Zapata’s things to be taken out of the cell and to stop giving him water, also took his bottle of vitamins and poured all the pills down a drain. He told him, ‘Those who are in protest here don’t drink vitamins. I think those are pills sent to you by the Yankees so you can continue your hunger strike.’ Those were the exact words said to him, I verified them. His vitamins were taken away, as were any other medications. And they stopped giving him water for a while.”6

This type of practice was also documented in the 1966 death of Roberto López Chávez.^{7, 8} Denying water to a man on a water only hunger strike is cruel treatment that contributed to his death.

Libeling Orlando Zapata Tamayo outside of Cuba

Professor Salim Lamrani in his November 23, 2010 article “Cuba, the Corporate Media and the Suicide of Orlando Zapata Tamayo” in The Huffington Post libeled not only the late Orlando Zapata Tamayo but 75 Cuban prisoners of conscience as criminals while challenging the integrity of Amnesty International (AI). 

In his attack on Amnesty and these Cubans he fails to mention that the imprisoned activists were locked up allegedly for “publishing articles or giving interviews to US-funded media, communicating with international human rights organizations and having contact with entities or individuals viewed to be hostile.”⁹

International standards, outlined in The Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, provide guide posts as to what is a legitimate charge and what is illegitimate. The charges made against the 75 Cubans by the Cuban dictatorship, and repeated by Lamrani, fall far short. 

Other human rights organizations found that Cuba's state security laws violate these principles, illegitimately restricting fundamental rights and unjustly imprisoning Cubans.¹⁰

Fake News
It is a sad state of affairs that much of the international media in Cuba have not caught on to these practices and regurgitate the Castro regime's position without underlining the skepticism it merits. Instead some hedge their language rather than get at the facts of the matter.

Sources

1. Weissert, Will “Cuba TV Report Denies Gov't Let Hunger Striker Die” Associated Press March 1, 2010 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9983762
2. Parenti, Michael Parenti and Jrapko, Alicia “Cuban Prisoners, Here and There” MRZINE 4/15/2010 http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pj150410.html republished by the Cuban Foreign Ministry at http://embacu.cubaminrex.cu/Default.aspx?tabid=18180 on 4/19/2010
3. Felipe Rojas, Luis “Abel Remembers the Last Days of Zapata in a Prison of Camaguey” Crossing the Barbed Wire November 24, 2010 http://cruzarlasalambradaseng.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/abel-remembers-the-last-days-of-zapata-in-a-prison-of-camaguey/ 
4. Amnesty International “CUBA Newly declared prisoners of conscience” January 29, 2004 http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR25/002/2004/en/308bf23e-d648-11dd-ab95-a13b602c0642/amr250022004en.html 
5. Sanchez, Yoani “Orlando Zapata Tamayo's Mother Speaks After Her Son's Death” The Huffington Post February 24, 2010 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/orlando-zapata-tamayos-mo_b_475006.html
6. Felipe Rojas, Luis “Abel Remembers the Last Days of Zapata in a Prison of Camaguey” Crossing the Barbed Wire November 24, 2010 http://cruzarlasalambradaseng.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/abel-remembers-the-last-days-of-zapata-in-a-prison-of-camaguey/
7. Valladares, Armando Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares (1st edition Knopf April 12, 1986) quote taken from (1st Edition Encounter Books April 1, 2001) pg. 379
8. Glazov, Jamie United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror WND Books, 2009 Pg 48
9. Amnesty International “Cuba: Five years too many, new government must release jailed dissidents” Amnesty International March 18, 2008 http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/cuba-five-years-too-many-new-government-must-release-jailed-dissidents-2
10. Human Rights Watch New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era November 18, 2009 HRW http://www.hrw.org/en/node/86554

The New York Times, the Castro regime, and Fake News

"The leader of pro-Castro opinion in the United States is Herbert L. Matthews , a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times. He did more than any other single man to bring Fidel Castro to power." - William F. Buckley Jr.,  Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations

Yesterday, blogged about the latest example of The New York Times bending over backwards to present the Castro dictatorship in a positive light. However, it is important to provide some historical context.

Beginning in 1957 editorial staff member and journalist Herbert Matthews built up Fidel Castro's image both inside and outside of Cuba with a series of misleading articles in The New York Times. In July 1959 Matthews reported: "[t]his is not a Communist Revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist." 

Anthony De Palma wrote an important book in 2006 on Herbert Matthews titled, "The Man Who Invented Fidel" that describes how Matthews's heroic portrayal of Fidel Castro influenced the fall of the Batista government and the consolidation of the future dictator as a national figure.

Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement successfully lobbied Washington to impose an arms embargo on the Batista regime on March 14, 1958, and the old dictator seeing that Washington was siding with Castro made the decision to abandon power on December 31, 1958.
  
William F. Buckley Jr. in an article in the March 1961 issue of The American Legion magazine outlined the impact of Mr. Matthews on the imposition of communism in Cuba and placed it in a larger context: 

"The leader of pro-Castro opinion in the United States is Herbert L. Matthews , a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times. He did more than any other single man to bring Fidel Castro to power. It could be said - with a little license - that Matthews was to Castro what Owen Lattimore was to Red China, and that the New York Times was Matthews's Institute of Pacific Relations: stressing this important difference, that no one has publicly developed against Matthews anything like the evidence subsequently turned up against Lattimore tending to show, in the words of a Senate investigating committee, that Lattimore was 'a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.'"

This was not the first time that The New York Times had a journalist who covered up communist crimes or attempted to portray a communist regime in a positive light.

Nearly ninety years ago Walter Duranty, an employee of The New York Times assisted in covering up the crimes of Josef Stalin. He was the newspaper's man in Moscow, and he repeated Stalinist propaganda and downplayed the atrocities taking place there. Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and decades later the world finally learned that more than 10 million people had died in a genocide in the Ukraine, despite the efforts of the New York Times reporter covering it up. Although Stalin's surviving victims sought to have the prize revoked, the Pulitzer Prize board refused to do it.

Over the next six decades, with a few notable exceptions, The New York Times would continue the tradition established with Herbert Matthews of giving positive coverage to the Castro dictatorship regardless what the facts are on the ground.

When one wonders why less people trust journalists the growing phenomenon of fake news should be looked at as a factor.

World Press Freedom Day 2017: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

"Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward". -   Mr. Dooley ( Finley Peter Dunne), 1902

On World Press Freedom Day the map of press freedom prepared by Reporters Without Borders is bleak with a darkening tide of censorship across the globe. Despite having a First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech and freedom of the press the United States today has 43 countries ahead of it with greater press freedoms.  This confirms the observation of the late conservative polemicist Joseph Sobran, who passed away in 2010 that “the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” It gives me no comfort to be able to say, but hey Cuba, our next door neighbor, is at 173 much less free then the USA. As a citizen and a patriot this is one list that if not number one, the United States should strive to be in the top ten. It has not been there for some time. The ten most censored countries in the world according to the Committee to Protect Journalists are also terrible places to live not only for journalists but everyday people.

A free press is a benchmark of a free society that needs to be celebrated and defended from both  external and internal threats to its good works. Since it is a free institution, it must be self-policing and only answer to its customers on the basis of the quality of the journalism.

The ten countries with the greatest press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders, in contrast do not have refugee exodus crises, even as is the case with Costa Rica (6) and Jamaica (8) they are not materially the richest countries but they are free peoples.

Today is a day to honor courageous and professional journalists who take their work seriously, but are willing to poke fun at themselves as Finley Peter Dunne did 115 years ago. It is an ironic tribute that his skewering of the self-important news media has been edited down and turned into a challenge to some journalists to "comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable." On this day let us comfort journalists afflicted for practicing their trade in closed societies.

.@mothermushroom has been detained since October and should be released immediately #FreethePress #WorldPressFreedomDay #WPF2017 pic.twitter.com/qDqIPT5Bwh

— CPJ Asia (@cpjasia) May 3, 2017

The Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, better known as Me Na or "Mother Mushroom" has been detained since October 2016 while trying to visit an imprisoned activist. She stands accused of "propagandizing against the state."  

Let us also recognize Nguyen Van Hoa, a 22 year old video journalist jailed for using a drone to broadcast environmental protests in Vietnam.

In Venezuela on the evening of May 1, 2017 Marcos Vergara and Deivis Valera, production assistants for the online media platform VivoPlay were taken into the custody of the Venezuelan National Guard while covering a protest, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Please spread the world and demand their freedom.

Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy, journalists for Al Jazeera who were arrested in Egypt in 2013, writing today in The Australian warn that a "tragedy is unfolding in Turkey. Independent journalism is being systematically stamped out. Prison doors are slamming, media outlets are being boarded up and a disturbing silence is falling over what has been a vibrant and ­diverse media landscape."

Be not silent before this atrocity against freedom.

George Orwell well understood that "Freedom of the press if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." He also understood what was not only "fake news" but also fake language and called it "newspeak" in his novel 1984. 

We must recognize that there are hacks that can due great and lasting damage peddling "fake news" working in free newspapers. The ghosts of Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews continue to possess the Gray Lady with their enduring and shameful legacies in Ukraine and Cuba. Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer covering up Stalin's 1930s manufactured famine in Ukraine that claimed eight to 10 million lives. With his reports denying the reality all around him this New York Times journalist was complicit in genocide. Twenty years later in Cuba Herbert Matthews engaged in a fallacious propaganda campaign disguised as news reporting to turn Fidel Castro into a national figure presenting him as an anti-communist and a democrat. The total number of dead  is still being added to 58 years later for the lies he reported in the 1950s.

However this hacks are small time purveyors of fake news compared to governments that manufacture entire news agencies, black mail journalists with the threat of expulsion.  The way to counter fake news is with more press freedom to challenge it along with greater reader discernment to weigh the facts and seek the truth. Facts matter, recognizing objective truth exists and getting the story right regardless of agendas is the best way to serve readers.

Believing the government can be dangerous to your freedom. President Ronald Reagan said it best, "trust but verify." He applied that to his dealings with the Russians, but it should be expanded when dealing with all governments.

However the threats to a free press are not only state actors, but also technology and artificial intelligence that threatens to simulate writing and overwhelm the net with inferior prose designed to push an agenda or a product and not inform a readership is a future threat. However, an ever present threat today thanks to the greed of Western technology companies such as Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Google and others that helped erect the Great Fire Wall of China. Modernizing totalitarianism and giving it new life into the 21st Century. Google is now collaborating with the Cuban intelligence service and military allowing them to store their servers. This means that journalists can write their articles but no one will be able to find them in their online searches. Russia is also now adopting their own version of the great fire wall. This is also a profound threat to press freedom.

The belief that legitimacy is no longer found in objective truth but in "positive results" has proven a destructive meme in schools of journalism that in the final analysis rejects reality as a social construct are bearing fruit in declining readership and sales.

These are great challenges but can be overcome if confronted and resisted.