Readers of this column have heard perhaps more than they want about hunger strikes in Cuba. In late February, the prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after an 83-day strike. Yes, 83 days — that’s a long time. And his jailers did not make it any easier for him, as I detailed in this piece. More about that piece in a moment. There is another hunger strike going on in Cuba now, by Guillermo Fariñas. Impromptus readers are well familiar with him. He is an independent journalist — not currently in prison — who is a perpetual thorn in the dictatorship’s side. Raúl Castro lashed out at him the other day, and at the dead Zapata. He said that hunger strikes such as theirs were “blackmail” organized by foreign countries, out to get Cuba. That’s how the Castro brothers talk. He also said that Cuban hunger strikers were glorified by “Western media.” I say: If only. What’s Raúl reading, National Review? (For a news story on Castro and his statements, go here.) In the March 22 NR, I had an essay about hunger striking — that is the piece I linked to above. And this is a relatively complicated subject, morally and otherwise. It’s not necessarily out of bounds to refer to a hunger strike as blackmail. Here is a paragraph from the essay:

A hunger strike is an extreme act, and an extremely coercive one. In a sense, the striker has a gun to his head, saying, “If you don’t meet my demands, I will kill myself. What’s more, it will be your fault.” People go on hunger strikes in the service of good causes and bad causes. Great men do it and wicked men do it. They do it in prison and out. They do it in democracies and under tyrannies. Some strikers are mad, others are perfectly sane. Some are mere showboaters, some are in earnest, even saintly. Some strike for a limited period of time — “I will deny myself food for a week. Let’s see what that achieves.” Others vow to go unto the end.

Who are some of the great men who have gone on hunger strike? Well, to consider the Soviet Union alone, one thinks immediately of Sakharov, Sharansky, and Bukovsky. And, in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes a mass hunger strike on the part of prisoners. It went on for three days. It did not do much good, however, because no one outside the camp heard about it. There were not many inquisitive reporters hanging around the Gulag. I suppose my introduction to hunger strikes was the IRA — Bobby Sands and all those boys, wasting away angelically. Even murderers and maimers can look pitiable as they waste away unto death. Vojislav Seselj, a sidekick to Milosevic, hunger-struck at The Hague. Terry Nichols, who conspired in the Oklahoma City bombing, has gone on strike: for a different diet, which must include a wheat-bran supplement. Nichols is an inmate in Colorado. As I say in my piece, “Planners of mass murder in America are very picky prisoners.” In any case, hunger strikes are, again, a complicated, many-faceted subject. I recently talked with Armando Valladares about it. He is the Cuban poet and former political prisoner who wrote Against All Hope, a classic memoir. Valladares went on hunger strike eleven times. The shortest was his first, three days; the longest was 36. He confirmed to me that, under a totalitarian dictatorship, a hunger strike is a last, desperate act. A person undertakes it when he feels he has no other choice. And I liked what a spokesman for Amnesty International, Gerardo Ducos, said at the time of Zapata’s death: “Faced with a prolonged prison sentence, the fact that Orlando Zapata Tamayo felt he had no other avenue available to him but to starve himself in protest is a terrible indictment of the continuing repression of political dissidents in Cuba.” Before I leave this subject, for now, let me just share the final paragraph of that NR piece:

I remember being horrified in 2008 when an inmate in [the Cuban] gulag — Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, an independent journalist [like Fariñas] — sewed his mouth shut. My horror was magnified when I saw an artist’s rendering of what the prisoner might look like in that condition. He had been tortured for so long, and was so deprived of hope, he committed this desperate, barely comprehensible act. What would we do in his shoes? Luckily, the likes of us will never find out.

Luckily, yeah. ‐I kind of chuckled when I read the headline — good news for the administration at last! The headline was, “Obama doesn’t bounce 1 in historic first pitch.” And the article went,

President Barack Obama threw it very high and wide, but at least he didn’t bounce it.
The president marked a 100-year tradition when he tossed out the ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener against the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday. . . .
One hundred years ago this month, President William Howard Taft led off the Washington baseball tradition with a toss from the stands to pitcher Walter Johnson.

Ah, this gives me a chance to brag — again, I believe. My great-grandfather knew Walter Johnson — the Big Train was a customer of his. My great-granddad had the Young Men’s Shop, corner of 13th and F. (Men’s accessories, I believe — cufflinks and the like.) President Roosevelt (FDR) was also a customer — I have a letter from him, somewhere. But Walter Johnson — that is really impressive. (And Johnson might well have done better at Yalta.) AMENDMENT: Family members write to inform me that the Young Men’s Shop had a full line of the finest clothing, and other goods — not merely accessories! My bad. ‐And it will forever remain my definition of quick thinking: “Because I’m Welsh.”

#JAYBOOK#