The National Assembly of People’s Power issued a note in Granma which cites their ”Solidarity with Puerto Rican students who have been on a hunger strike for nearly a month to fight to save public education, which the annexationists intend to destroy.”
These students are surrounded by police, without electricity and water, and other young people from different university campuses and several relatives were brutally beaten by police and arrested for trying to bring them food and medicine. Accordingly, the official organ of the National Assembly of People’s Power proclaimed its full solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico and declared that it is time for them to rebel.
But why didn’t the National Assembly of People’s Power release a similar note supporting the 83-day hunger strike of Lic. Guillermo Fariñas Hernández in the just claim for the freedom of 26 men who are languishing in Cuban jails where their rights are constantly violated and their families, as is the case with the Ladies in White – their wives, daughters, and mothers – when they go into the streets to demand that justice be done, are savagely beaten by people incited to violence no matter the consequences.
Why did they bereave Reina Luisa Tamayo Danger of her son Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience who died on February 23 after 84 days on a hunger strike for asking only that he be treated with the same conditions as Fidel during the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista, and in whose case Captain Filiberto of the Cerámica Roja prison in Camagüey withheld water for 18 days and killed him, and the government tried to tarnish his image by deceiving the people that he was a common criminal who wanted a refrigerator and mobile phone in his cell.
The chair of the National Assembly of People’s Power sounds the alarm for the Puerto Rican people once again forgetting the thousands of petitions and requests that have been presented by member of civil society demanding the immediate and unconditional release of Cuban political prisoners.