By IANS/EFE,
Havana : The remains of Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo were laid to rest early Thursday in his home town amid a “genuine state of siege”, a leading dissident said.
Banes, in the eastern province of Holguin, has been “occupied since Tuesday”, the day Zapata died after a nearly three-month hunger strike, Elizardo Sanchez told EFE.
At least 50 government opponents were detained or confined to their homes to prevent their attending the funeral, according to Sanchez, chairman of the unofficial Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Banes, he said, “was like a town in the Philippines seized by the Japanese army”.
Dissidents and the deceased’s family say Gen. Raul Castro’s government withheld Zapata’s body until Wednesday and then demanded that he be buried that afternoon.
After the dead dissident’s mother, Reina Tamayo, asked to be allowed to hold a wake and delay the burial, authorities said interment could take place at 7:00 a.m. Thursday, Sanchez said.
“They wanted to bury him before Banes woke up,” the commission chairman said.
Prominent blogger Yoani Sanchez said she was briefly detained Wednesday while walking to the home of another dissident to sign a book of condolences for Zapata’s family.
Cuba’s state media monopoly continues to ignore Zapata’s death, even though Raul Castro issued a public statement Wednesday “lamenting” the prisoner’s demise.
In a brief communique, Gen. Castro said Zapata’s death was the result – in some unspecified way – of Cuba’s troubled relationship with the US and insisted that the only place in Cuba where torture occurs is the detention centre for terror suspects at the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay.
“There are no torture victims, there have been no torture victims, there have been no executions. That happens at the base in Guantanamo,” Castro said as he and visiting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were touring the port of Mariel, near Havana.
Zapata’s mother and leading dissidents say the prisoner’s health was poor prior to beginning the hunger strike due to beatings and mistreatment behind bars.
The 42-year-old Zapata was one of 75 government opponents rounded up and jailed in spring 2003 on charges of conspiring with the US to undermine the Cuban Revolution. While some of those dissidents have since been freed on medical grounds, more than 50 remain behind bars on the communist-ruled island.
Officials added years to Zapata’s original sentence because of his repeated protests over prison conditions.
He stopped eating in December with the aim of pressuring authorities to acknowledge his designation by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.
Last week, officials at the penitentiary in the eastern city of Camag�ey grew alarmed about Zapata’s condition and transferred him to a prison hospital in Havana, from where he was later taken to the military clinic where he died.