A Cuban dissident whose death this week following a two-and-a-half-month hunger strike sparked worldwide condemnation, was buried early Thursday by a circle of close friends and family members, his mother told selfnews. 'We just finished burying him, and many of his brothers (fellow dissidents) joined us,' said Reina Luisa Tamayo, 60, the mother of deceased political activist Orlando Zapata. Tamayo said her son, a longtime opponent of the Communist regime, was buried in the family's hometown of de Banes, 830 kilometers (500 miles) east of Havana, in a ceremony attended by dozens of loved ones and supporters. Zapata's grieving mother said the funeral procession and burial took place -- under police escort -- a few kilometers (miles) from the family home in the eastern province of Holguin. 'We wanted to carry my son to the cemetery but we couldn't, so his body was taken to the funeral by hearse,' she said. Zapata's death on Tuesday after an 85-day hunger strike has drawn international outrage, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying Wednesday that Washington was 'deeply distressed.' The longtime political activist, who was designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, had been in jail since 2003. Reports said police detained dissidents across the country to prevent protests ahead of his funeral. President Raul Castro said in a statement that he 'regrets' Zapata's death, but denied there was repression in the only single-party Communist state in the Americas. 'There are no tortured people, there were no tortured people, there was no execution,' Castro, 78, told reporters. 'That is what happens at (the US naval base in) Guantanamo.' But Zapata's mother had a different version of events. 'My son was tortured the whole time he was in prison,' Tamayo charged in a video posted on the blog Generacion Y, a site run by award-winning independent journalist Yoani Sanchez, in defiance of Havana's tightly controlled state media. Tamayo implored 'the international community to demand the release of the rest of (Cuba's political) prisoners ... so that what happened to my boy does not happen again.' Fearing protests, police detained some 30 dissidents Tuesday and Wednesday according to Elizardo Sanchez, spokesman for the outlawed Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. Dissidents were also rounded up in the eastern provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Guantanamo, Las Tunas and Camaguey, and in the central city of Placetas, Sanchez said. 'Some also have been held in their houses, without a judicial warrant, to prevent people from going to the wake,' he told selfnews. Zapata, who was initially given a three-year prison term, saw his sentence grow to 36 years as additional charges of 'disobedience' and 'disorder in a penal establishment' were added. Sanchez said it was the first time since 1972 that a Cuban opposition figure died while on a hunger strike. Zapata's death is 'bad news for the human rights movement and for the government as well,' he said. 