The death of Orlando Zapata after 85 days on hunger strike in Havana’s Combinado del Este prison hospital raises difficult questions for friends of the Cuban Revolution. In contrast to virtually every Latin American country under the patronage of the United States Cuba, since the revolution, as Raul Castro points out, has not had extrajudicial murders and systematic torture on the island is exclusively practised in Guantanamo.
Zapata had originally been sentenced to three years for “receiving funds from Washington, public disorder and “disobedience.” His sentence was increased to 36 years for “disorder in a penal establishment”. He stopped eating on December 3rd as a gesture of protest against what he claimed were abuses and beatings by guards.
Raul Castro has expressed his regret at the death and in something of a non-sequitur said that “all these problems will end” as soon as Washington “decides to live in peace with us.”
The Morning Star says Tamayo “was a member of groups suspected of links to the CIA”. These were the Alternative Republican Movement and the National Civic Resistance Committee and that seems like a little bit of post hoc justification. The level of surveillance in Cuban society would allow the state to establish pretty quickly if a group were getting material and political support from the US embassy. Anyway “suspected of links” is a beautifully vague phrase. It covers the spectrum from receiving weapons and military training; taking cash; or a couple of inconsequential meetings.
If you have ever seen the body of a person after 70 or 80 days on a political hunger strike you know that their motivation is both profound and intrinsic. It’s not something that anyone else can force them to continue with, not least because when the hunger striker is moved to a hospital any group pressure is removed and instead is replaced by relatives and medical staff urging them to stop.
Tamayo’s death has given a tremendous boost to enemies of the Cuban revolution. For supporters of the revolution it once again obliges reflection on what a post-revolutionary democracy might look like. It cannot be simply a one party state. The whole history of the international revolutionary movement tells us that no society can be represented by a single political party. The various groups, moods and experiences of the working class and its allies require a plurality of parties, unions and organisations which are able to openly present their programmes. The alternative is that these programmes are secretly contested inside the dominant monolith. We can go further and say that even organisations in favour of the restoration of bourgeois democracy should be given the freedom to organise, though stripped of the massive advantages that their access to a friendly press gives them.
If Tamayo had not been locked up for trivial offences that offered no real threat to the Cuban revolution the counter-revolution in Cuba and the United States would be without a martyr. Defending the legacy and legitimacy of that revolution is not incompatible with supporting a pluralist socialist democracy in Cuba.
Liam redux 
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