Family of Cuban hunger striker headed to Miami

[alp227]

Source: CNN

Havana (CNN) -- The mother of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a political prisoner who died last year after a prolonged hunger strike, says she will continue to fight for democracy in Cuba after she emigrates to the United States on Thursday.

Reina Luisa Tamayo and 12 relatives will land in Miami as political refugees, taking the ashes of Zapata with them.

"This whole process have been very painful," she said as the extended family walked out of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana on Wednesday. "I have here with me the ashes of a martyr for democracy, the peaceful warrior Orlando Zapata Tamayo."

Zapata died in February 2010 after fasting for more than 80 days to demand better prison conditions. Fellow dissident Guillermo Farinas then launched his own hunger strike to demand the release of political prisoners.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/06/08/cuba.prisoner.family/index.html

[Pterodactyl]

1. The government of Cuba sucks.

[dipsydoodle]

2. She should've gone to Spain

where she'd have been generally ignored as is the case with other dissidents and their families who'd expected to be feted there.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo committed suicide by his own choice.

Rec'd because she's one less drain on the Cuban economy. She's one of the Ladies in White - that pack of Miami funded jokers.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Yes, she is. They're working for the US, doing the bidding of their sponsors.

Learned long ago the group of women in Argentina, the mothers whose children were actually tortured and murdered by the fascist, US-supported government (Kissinger egged them on, according to records) actually have expressed deep resentment and contempt for these clowns and the fact that they, the Cuban, US-employed "women in white" have attempted to soak up some respect for themselves by using the group name of real women who faced persecution and murder themselves by the military dictatorship of Argentina for protesting the torture and murder of their children, and the theft of the living infants of the "leftist" female political prisoners after they were forced to give birth before being thrown alive out of airplanes.

Simply amazing, isn't it? How incurious some people really are to find out what has been going on and what is real.

On edit, adding images of the real "Women in White," the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100380/When-Death-Seems-Inevitable.aspx









Mothers marching in the Plaza de Mayo with cutouts of their
"disappeared" sons. Photo by Gerardo Dell’Orto, 1990

Mothers as Agents of Political Change: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
May 13, 2007 by Bouvard Marguerite Guzman

~snip~
The military junta that took power in 1976 suspended all political institutions and began what it referred to as "anti-subversive operations" to capture and interrogate all members of suspect organizations, their sympathizers, associates and anyone else who might oppose its rule. The government regarded leftist and reformers as a threat to Argentina’s way of life and made their destruction one of its main goals. However, because the junta did not wish to incur international censure for its policies, it resorted to the deadly practice of disappearances. The state-sponsored terror was like the Nazi policy of Night and Fog, whereby members of the Resistance throughout occupied Europe were abducted and secretly transferred to Germany without a trace.

In what is now referred to as the Dirty War, thousands of gifted and idealistic young adults vanished into the 365 concentration camps scattered throughout Argentina. On the basis of the data they have gathered, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo claim that there are 30,000 los desaparecidos — "the disappeared." There were also many cases of entire families who had disappeared and who had no one to testify on their behalf.

Susana Da Guidano, one of the Mothers, told me about her son’s fate: "They stormed his apartment and beat him up in front of his wife and children and then they took him away. He never returned." He happened to be a well known nuclear physicist, but the letters that came pouring in from around the world on his behalf were of no avail.

Whole classes of medical students at the university disappeared. Many pregnant women who vanished into the concentration camps were kept alive until they gave birth. In a horrendous twist of fate, their babies were then adopted by members of the military whose wives were unable to have children.

What set the Mothers apart from other dissident groups was their bravery, their audacity and the manner in which they outwitted the junta at a time when many people sought refuge from their fear in the belief that if one remained quiet and focused one’s attention on personal matters, nothing would happen.

More:
http://womensvoicesforchange.org/mothers-as-agents-of-political-change-the-mothers-of-the-plaza-de-mayo.htm