Seven Steps to Kill Orlando Zapata Tamayo

Seven Steps to Kill Orlando Zapata Tamayo / Luis Felipe Rojas
Posted on March 1, 2015

Luis Felipe Rojas — I published this post a few days after that needless
death. Now I again denounce the death and express the same ideas about
it. It's my homage to my brother, Orlando Zapata Tamayo.

I am still experiencing the pain caused by that avoidable death, and I
feel impotent because I didn't attend the funeral honoring him due to
political impediments, but that hasn't stopped me from saying that in
any case, what I present here seem to be the seven final steps that
advanced the repressive machinery used to kill Zapata.

1. Setting up that para-judicial theater that imposed a sentence of 63
years on him for contempt.

2. The continuous beatings accompanied by obscene words and insults
about his race and the region where he lived (shitty negro, shitty peasant).

3. Putting him in prisons that were located far away from his mother's
home (Prison Kilo Cinco y Medio in Pinar del Rio, Prison Kilo 8 in
Camaguey).

4. The beatings in November 2009 in the Holguin jail when they knocked
him down smashing his leg with a steel bar, on his knee cap, and that
his mother saw again when she opened the coffin in her house in Banes
and also discovered that there were other marks of the beating with
clubs that he surely received months before.

5. The forced removal to Camaguey and the robbery of his belongings on
December 3 when they confiscated the only food he was eating in prison.
This was the fact that made in declare a hunger strike.

6. Taking away water for the 18 days in the middle of the strike even
when he had said that he was declaring a hunger strike but would drink
small amounts of water.

7. The maneuver of taking him to a hospital for prisoners in Camaguey,
west of Havana, and putting him in a room that was not set up for
treating prisoners in a grave condition.

I lack the power of analysis in this case, but please don't keep saying
that the government didn't have a hand in his death. The execution order
was given from the office of General Raul Castro Ruz.

Translated by Regina Anavy

23 February 2015

Source: Seven Steps to Kill Orlando Zapata Tamayo / Luis Felipe Rojas |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/seven-steps-to-kill-orlando-zapata-tamayo-luis-felipe-rojas/