Remembering Orlando Zapata
by Robert Morrison
March 5, 2010
God bless the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady. She’s a defender of liberty. Her March 1st column, “Viva Zapata,” urges us to remember the Cuban human rights champion, Orlando Zapata. This humble stone mason died in a military prison in Havana last week. Zapata was only 42. He had gone on an 84-day hunger strike to protest Fidel Castro’s inhuman treatment of thousands of prisoners of conscience in Cuba, one of the last of the Stalinist regimes in the world.
I say “one of the last” in a spirit of hope. Surely China is a Stalinist regime. So is North Korea. What does it mean to call Castro’s island prison a Stalinist regime?
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. Then, Fidel Castro was already planning an invasion of his homeland. The bearded revolutionary had not yet brought down his iron fist on Cuba, the “pearl of the Antilles.” Orlando Zapata had not even been born yet. Nor had any of today’s tyrants in Beijing or Pyongyang. Continue reading »
