Yesterday in Washington, DC the 18th annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony convened by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was held. The Center for a Free Cuba, Cuba Decide, and the Unión de Ex-Presos Políticos Cubanos took part in this annual event in remembrance of all the victims of Communism around the world. Below is the video of the entire event.
Cubans, who are still struggling to free Cuba from the Castro communist dictatorship, also highlighted the plight of victims of Cuban Communism, and those still fighting for freedom, and paying the ultimate price.
Cuban dissidents tortured and killed.
Torturing prisoners of conscience into hunger strike and death
Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros (2020, Wilman Villar Mendoza (2012), Orlando Zapata Tamayo (2010), and Pedro Luis Boitel are four cases of Cuban prisoners of conscience who have died while on hunger strike in Cuban prisons. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Pedro Luis Boitel.
Orlando Zapata Tamayo
Orlando Zapata Tamayo was born in Santiago, Cuba on May 15, 1967. He was by vocation a brick layer and also a human rights activist, a member of the Movimiento Alternativa Republicana, Alternative Republican Movement, and of the Consejo Nacional de Resistencia Cívica, National Civic Resistance Committee. Orlando gathered signatures for the Varela Project, a citizen initiative to amend the Cuban constitution using legal means with the aim of bringing Cuba in line with international human rights standards.
Amnesty International had documented how Orlando had been arrested several times in the past. For example he was temporarily detained on 3 July 2002 and 28 October 2002. In November of 2002 after taking part in a workshop on human rights in the central Havana park, José Martí, he and eight other government opponents were arrested and later released. He was also arrested on December 6, 2002 along with fellow prisoners of conscience Oscar Elías Biscet and Raúl Arencibia Fajardo.
On February 23, 2010, Cuban prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after years of physical and psychological torture that began in 2003 and drove him to repeatedly protest prison conditions and, beginning on December 3, 2009, to undertake a water-only hunger strike that ended in his death. Aggravating this already extreme situation was the fact that prison officials repeatedly denied him water in an effort to get him to end the strike. Amnesty International condemned the death at the time and urged Raul Castro “to immediately and unconditionally release all prisoners of conscience after a political activist died following a hunger strike.” Twelve years later, the prisoners of conscience are still there, and the International Red Cross has not had access to Cuban prisons, save for a brief period over 30 years ago in 1989.
Pedro Luis Boitel
Poor prison conditions and ill treatment driving prisoners to go on hunger strike has been taking place for decades. The case of Pedro Luis Boitel is from 1972.
Martyred student leader Pedro Luis Boitel fought by Fidel Castro’s side to bring an end to the Batista dictatorship and restore Cuban democracy. However, as Castro came to impose a communist regime, the student leader became a liability.
Pedro Luis Boitel was born in Cuba to a family of modest means of French origin. He studied at the University of Havana while working as a radio technician. He was also a poet. Opposing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, he joined the July 26 movement led by Fidel Castro. The majority of the movement’s members, like Pedro Luis, were anti-communists.
Once Batista left for exile and Fidel Castro took control, the anti-communist members of the July 26 movement became an obstacle to absolute power. Following the revolution, Boitel returned to University, where his fellow students nominated him to run for the presidency of the Federation of University Students in 1960. Fidel Castro personally intervened to remove him from the presidency. Pedro Luis Boitel refused to betray the Federation of University Students. He sought to maintain academic freedom and autonomy. This made Pedro Luis an obstacle to the emerging communist regime.
As time went on and the dictatorial nature of the Castro regime became more apparent, the student leader became an opponent of Fidel Castro. Condemned to a decade in prison in 1961, he served the cruel and unjust sentence, but as the date of his release came and went, prison officials refused to release him. While imprisoned, Boitel continued to challenge the repression and the impunity of regime prison officials. […]
In response to the years of cruelty, torture, and now denial of his freedom, he went on hunger strike on April 3, 1972. Pedro Luis Boitel died fifty two years ago on May 25, 1972, after 53 days on hunger strike in Havana at the Castillo del Principe prison. Academic freedom and autonomy ended in 1960 and were replaced with fear, repression, and ideological litmus tests to attend university. It has still not been restored today. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
Massacres in Cuba: The body count continues to rise
2022
On October 28, 2022, off the coast of Bahía Honda, Artemisa Province, Ministry of the Interior (MININT) agents of the communist dictatorship in Cuba rammed and sank a speedboat of fleeing Cuban refugees. Seven Cubans were killed in this latest attack, and their names are: Aimara Meizoso, Israel Gómez, Indira Serrano, Omar Reyes, Yerandy García, Nathali Acosta, and Elizabeth Meizoso (age two). This is not an isolated incident, but the latest in a list of vessels sunk by the regime to prevent Cubans from fleeing communism. Those who survived the attack on October 28th stated that the MININT vessels blocked their path as soon as their boat departed, and that they were deliberately attacked to break the boat in half with which they intended to flee the island. These witness reports, gathered after the event, say that one of the repressors threatened to “split them in two.”
1994
37 were killed in 1994 with the attack and sinking of the tugboat “13 de Marzo”, scores of Cubans were killed in the Canímar River massacre in 1980, and five killed in the massacre of Barlovento in 1962. This is a partial accounting. The Cuban Coast Guard vessels of the Cuban dictatorship in all these cases were used as weapons against Cubans who tried to flee the island, regardless of the presence of children, women, or the elderly.
One need not commandeer a boat to be targeted for death.
Suspected Cuban migrants beaten down by club wielding regime agents.
The United States in 1993 documented in a protest note sent to the Cuban government how MININT vessels, determined to stop Cuban refugees from reaching the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base, tossed grenades, and machine-gunned fleeing swimmers, and recovered their bodies with gaff hooks used in sport fishing.
In 1980, Fidel Castro began by insulting those seeking to leave as “scum” and “worms”, and he took children and youth out of school to take part in acts of repudiation. According to Carlos Alberto Montaner, the students killed a teacher that they had discovered running away. Forty Cubans who simply wanted to leave Cuba were lynched. This would become known as the Mariel boat lift.
A 1995 monograph by academics Holly Ackerman and Juan Clark, The Cuban Balseros: Voyage of Uncertainty reported that “as many as 100,000 Cuban rafters may have perished trying to leave Cuba.”
International terrorism
Gerardo Hernandez was found guilty of murder conspiracy and sentenced to life for the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down.
The communist dictatorship in Cuba has also sponsored terrorism, and engaged in terrorism that has killed Americans both in international airspace, and in the United States.
The WASP Network (La Red Avispa) was made up of over forty officers and agents, four escaped to Cuba when the FBI began rounding them up in 1998. Ten were captured, and five of them pleaded guilty and cooperated with the prosecution and became unpersons in Cuba. The five who did not cooperate, remained loyal to Castro, and became the focus of an international propaganda campaign organized by the Castro regime. Rene Gonzalez served 13 years of his 15 year prison sentence and was the first of the spies freed in 2011. The second to be freed was Fernando Gonzalez after completing his sentence in February 2014. The campaign did not end until December 2014 when the remaining three spies (Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramon Labanino ) with the longest prison sentences, had them commuted by President Obama.
The Wasp Network engaged in espionage: targeted U.S. military facilities, planned to smuggle arms and explosives into the United States, infiltrated two non-violent exile groups, and carried out numerous other activities to sow division, shape public opinion, meddle in U.S. elections, and provided information for Operation Scorpion that led to the extrajudicial killings of Armando Alejandre Jr, Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales on February 24, 1996. Operation Scorpion was a Cuban intelligence operation of the Castro regime that sought to destroy Brothers to the Rescue using MiG fighters to shoot down their planes in an act of state terrorism carried out over international airspace.
Terror bombing in New York City
Frank Connor killed by Castro backed terrorists in New York City.
The Puerto Rican terrorist group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña, (FALN), ‘FALN was started in the mid-1960’s with a nucleus . . . that received advanced training in Cuba. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, the FALN carried out more than 130 bombings, including in the United States killing five Americans in the New York City area. There were many other terrorist groups trained, and equipped in Cuba over the past 63 years, but for the sake of brevity will focus on the FALN.
The FALN was responsible for the January 24, 1975 explosion at Fraunces Tavern, which killed Alejandro Berger (28), James Gezork (32), Frank Connor (33), Harold H. Sherburne (66) and wounded 63 others; a bombing spree in New York City in August 1977 that killed Charles Steinberg, (age 26), injured six, and forced the evacuation of 100,000 office workers; and the purposeful targeting and maiming of four police officers, among many other crimes. Frank Thomas Connor was having lunch with clients when the bomb exploded, his body was pulverized and his life was ended.
“Frank was born to a humble immigrant Irish family in the Washington Heights section of New York City. His father, Thomas Connor, was an elevator operator. Frank’s Mom, Margaret Maloney Connor was a cleaning lady at Morgan Guaranty Trust. Frank pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. He graduated from Bishop Dubois High School in Washington Heights. Frank went on to study at City College of New York. Frank paused in his studies for Mary Lynch, the most beautiful woman in the world. After their marriage, Frank resumed college at night. He graduated with the class of 1973 from Farleigh Dickenson College in New Jersey. Frank worked for Morgan Guaranty Trust. Together, Frank and Mary had two fine sons, Thomas and Joseph. On the day their father died Tom was 11 and Joe was 9 years of age.” [ Source: Find a grave ]