"Today, Feb. 25, we're burying him," shouted Reina, the distraught mother, in an interview with a European TV network.

She was like a wounded beast. ``It was premeditated murder,'' she charged as she wept. She is a black, humble woman, like her son, a simple mason who wanted to be free. Reina wanted to carry her son in her arms to the cemetery, accompanied by a few distraught friends, all of them opposition democrats.

She couldn't. The political police refused. Always the political police, intimidating, punishing, browbeating society so it may obey in silence. They're like the dogs that herd the sheep.

Poor mothers! Some weeks ago, a mother like Reina -- though older and white -- died in Cuba, Gloria Amaya. Three of her sons went to prison. One of them, Ariel Sigler Amaya, is being killed for being a rebel, same as happened to Orlando Zapata Tamayo. He entered prison weighing 90 kilos. Today, he weighs 50 and needs a wheelchair. He doesn't have long to live, his brother tells me.

Doña Gloria, a fragile, small elderly woman, had two ribs broken by the political police, who kicked her in the chest. She had protested because they were mistreating her son, a political prisoner, and was almost killed for her efforts. From the floor, twisting in agony, she continued to beg for her son's release. Yet Raúl Castro says that no one is tortured in Cuba. Liar!

Zapata Tamayo's death has three serious internal consequences for the dictatorship of the brothers Castro. For the opposition democrats in that country, that sacrifice reinforces the commitment to fight. Perhaps it's a feature of our culture: Loyalty to those who gave up their lives is never betrayed.

But Zapata Tamayo's blood has another internal effect. It shames the communists. It demoralizes and weakens them. It places them on the side of the murderers. Some years ago, when the political police exterminated by drowning 32 persons who were trying to flee aboard a boat called the 13 de Marzo, most of them women and children, many militants quit the Party, filled with repugnance. That was too much.

Outside Cuba, this new crime galvanizes the exiles in support of a just cause. The day Orlando died, the news most widely diseminated by Twitter was that. A wave of anger and solidarity surged through a dispersed community that numbers close to three million, descendants included.

Newspapers 'round the world gave front-page treatment to the grim news coming from Havana. Many television stations began their newscasts by reporting what had happened in words filled with consternation. The image of the dictatorship crashed loudly to the ground and that noise, of course, had a deep political repercussion.

It is expected that Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos will end his absurd campaign to demolish the European Union's common stance toward the Cuban dictatorship. No greater stubbornness has ever been seen in the defense of a dishonorable cause than Moratinos' effort to benefit the Castros' tyranny.

The Cuban apparatus of defamation is preparing its counterattack, of course. One of its minor pawns began by saying that those who condemned this horrendous death wept crocodile tears. Others will say that Zapata Tamayo was a common criminal or a terrorist in the service of the CIA.

They lack any vestige of decency. They'll say anything. But the unassailable truth is something else, as his mother, Reina, shouted through tears -- Orlando was murdered with premeditation because he asked for freedom for himself and his people. His example will weigh for a long time on the history of Cuba.