Uncommon Sense

Cuba launches propaganda attack on 2 survivors of Oswaldo Paya crash

Granma, the Cuban communist party's daily rag, on Tuesday launched a propaganda offensive against the two European politicians who survived the car crash that killed Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero.

The newspaper accused the pair, Ángel Carromero of Spain, who was driving the car, and Jens Aron Modig of Sweden, of lying to win entry onto the island and then subsequently getting involved with activities "against the constitutional order of Cuba." The editorial also said Carromero is facing a murder charge in the case.

The attack comes a day after the pair were shown on video backing up the government's account of Paya's death, that the crash was an accident caused by Carromero's careless driving, and not by another vehicle as some have claimed. Granma said only the "Miami mafia" has accused the Castro regime of carrying out a political assassination of Paya, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement.

Granma also chastized the international media for not questioning why Carromero and Modig, members of conservative political parties in their respective countries, were in Cuba in the first place. The editorial slammed Modig for his membership in the Swedish Christian Democratic Party, comparing it to the Tea Party in the United States.

The broadside from Granma appears to be part of Cuban government campaign to pressure Carromero and Modig as Paya's family, Cuban dissidents and many overseas pressure the regime to offer a full, transparent account of how Paya and Cepero were killed.

Since the July 22 crash, Carromero and Modig have been prevented from leaving Cuba and are being held in isolation, according to various accounts.

With their comments Monday, Carromero and Modig showed that the pressure may be working. Reuters reports:

Modig said he had been sent by his party to meet with Paya and members of his Christian Liberation Movement and give him 4,000 Euros ($4,904) to help finance his work.

He said he now regrets his involvement with the dissidents.

"I understand that these activities are not legal in Cuba and would like to apologize for having come to this country to carry out illicit activities," Modig said.

In the video, Carromero requested help in getting out of his predicament and that the case not become a political matter.

"I ask the international community to please concentrate on getting me out of here and to not use the traffic accident that could have happened to any other person for political ends," he said.

For more, read CubaEncuentro.com's description of the Granma editorial.

I won't publish a link to Granma, but you can Google it. As of this morning, I couldn't find the editorial on either the newspaper's Spanish-language or English-language sites.

Castro 'terror squad' besieges Cuban dissident Jorge Cervantes and his family

For more than two weeks a Castro-ordered mob has besieged the home of Cuban dissident Jorge Cervantes. At one point, goons entered his home, took several items and burned them, according to a report posted at Diario de Cuba.

"These are no longer the classic 'rapid response brigades,' who scream and offend. These people are covering their faces," said Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, head of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), of which Cervantes is a member. "We (UNPACU) are calling them 'terror squads."

Ferrer said the attacks are designed to try to force Cervantes, one UNPACU's most active members, to abandon his anti-Castro activism.

Cervantes said the mobs have traumatized his three children, as well as his neighbors.

Authorities have accused Cervantes, a former political prisoner, of painting anti-Castro signs, but Cervantes said they know that is impossible because he and his family have been besieged by the mobs for more than 15 days.

Cervantes has asked local government and Catholic Church officials to intervene on his behalf, but nothing has come from those requests.

Sign petition demanding truth about the deaths of Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero

Add your name to those of demanding the truth about deaths of Cuban dissidents Oswaldo Payáand Harold Cepero.

Sign the petition demanding the truth HERE.

Friend says Cuban dissident Harold Cepero 'paid the ultimate price for liberty'

Harold Cepero

Much has been written about dissident leader Oswaldo Paya, and rightfully so, since his death July 22 in a car crash in eastern Cuba.

But there was a second man who died in the crash, Harold Cepero, leader of the youth wing of Paya's Christian Liberation Movement.

Yuri Perez-Vazquez, a Cuban exile working as an intern at the Cato Institute, remembers his friend:

Harold Cepero was a young man full of good intentions and with strong commitment toward his fellow man. I met him because we share many things in common, but one marked our lives forever. As with many other idealistic young Cubans, we were expelled from the university due our passion for freedom. Although we just wanted to have fun, improve ourselves and our Cuba, we faced the intolerant rule of the Castro brothers, the Cuban Communist Party, and the covert action of their secret police. Several requests directed to Cuban authorities, UNESCO and the OAS Inter-American Commission of Human Rights did not succeed in our efforts to go back to university. In fact, Cuban authorities stood by their discriminatory policy against “non-revolutionaries.” UNESCO sided with the Cuban government, despite recognizing human rights violations, and we are still waiting for the Inter-American Commission. (See here and here.)

In a country where young people are forced to adore the Castros’ revolution, are forbidden to think, and if they think, they cannot speak and act accordingly, we made the right choice. Harold had a gracious girlfriend, played soccer, and strived for a better future. He collected signatures for the Varela Project, a citizen initiative led by Paya to promote a peaceful transition to democracy that gained the support of thousands of fellow citizens. After being expelled from university, he decided to give himself to the service of the others and became a Catholic seminarian. However that was not his vocation, and Harold paid the ultimate price for liberty: he ended sacrificing his life on a very different altar.

In this tragic moment I recall images of their beloved families. Oswaldo Paya’s wife, Ofelia and their children, and Harold Cepero’s parents and brother. The immense grieving for the loss of these great Cubans is not only theirs, but also belongs to every freedom lover. As Jesus Christ, Paya’s and Harold’s teacher said, “There is no greater love than this to lay one’s life down for a friend.”

Oswaldo Paya's widow rejects dictatorship's version of his death

I am no accident reconstruction expert, but I think Oswaldo Paya's widow has good reason to be suspicious about the dictatorship's version of how her husband died Sunday.

Efe reports:

The widow of prominent Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya said she does not accept the official government statement on the cause of the car crash that killed her husband and is demanding to meet with the two survivors of the accident.

"I'm not going to accept the version the government's giving. In no way do I accept it," Ofelia Acevedo told Efe Friday after Cuban state television made public an Interior Ministry note on the accident.

Paya, the 60-year-old leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, and 31-year-old Harold Cepero, also a member of that dissident organization, died in the accident last Sunday near Bayamo, a city 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of Havana.

The driver of the vehicle, Spain's Angel Carromero, an activist with the youth wing of his country's governing conservative Popular Party, and Sweden's Jens Aron Modig, chairman of the Christian Democrat Youth League, were slightly injured.

The Cuban government said in its note - released Friday - that speeding on a highway where roadwork was being done caused the deadly accident.

"Until I'm able to speak with Angel and Aron, the last two people who saw my husband alive, have access to the expert reports and have the advice of people independent of the Cuban government, I can't have an idea of what really happened that day. I have to meet with those boys."

Both young men are in custody in Cuba. The Spaniard is being held at a police station in Bayamo and the Swede by immigration authorities in Havana.

"I learned of that version of the events on television. The right thing would have been to inform the family beforehand so I could express my doubts. They have all the information and can prepare the vision of the accident they want (to convey)," Acevedo said.

"There are a lot of things to clarify with respect to that version. Just listening to it a series of questions came to me. I have to learn the truth because what was reported on television is not the truth and I'll keep demanding that the Cuban government allow me to meet with those boys they have under investigation. It's my right," she said.

"I'm not going to discuss the details because I'm not an expert in forensic matters. But I know that my husband wouldn't allow them to speed, that he was always alert and responsible for those accompanying him in the car, even if he wasn't driving and knew the road very well," Acevedo said.

Read the rest here.

Cuban activists arrested for demanding that state radio report on Oswaldo Paya's significance

Cuban state media have reported that this past Sunday near the town of Bayamo there was a traffic crash in which two people were killed.

The world knows that one of the fatalities was Oswaldo Paya, one of Cuba's most prominent dissidents.

But as for in Cuba, the communist press, which is just another part of the Castro dictatorship, has fallen far short of reporting on the significance of Paya and his death, and questions about how the crash exactly happened.

Some Cubans are not putting up with such shoddy reporting.

The independent CIHPRESS news agency is reporting that several dissidents were arrested Monday evening when they went to the offices of state-run Radio Bayamo to demand that it report on the significance of Paya's life and death.

Those arrested included Annia Peralta, Marelis Fonseca, Emiliano González, Yoandri Gutiérrez, Roberto Rodríguez and Yadier Blanco.

Gutiérrez, who was released Tuesday evening, explained what the demonstrators were seeking.

"We were only demanding that this station report to the people who Orlando Zapata was, for they have mentioned his name in the press without describing the importance of this great political figure," Gutiérrez said.

Who killed Oswaldo Paya?

From Carl Gershman, president of National Endowment for Democracy, via the Washington Post:

With the death of Oswaldo Payá, a key leader of the Cuban democratic opposition, Cuba has suffered what the writer Yoani Sanchez called “a dramatic loss for its present and an irreplaceable loss for its future.” The circumstances surrounding Payá’s death Sunday have sparked controversy similar to that caused in October by the death of Laura Pollan , the leader of the much-acclaimed Ladies in White, just weeks after she was attacked at a protest march by a government supporter.

The Cuban government said that Payá died in a traffic accident near the city of Bayamo when his car slammed into a tree, killing him and another passenger and injuring two others. But Payá’s daughter, Rosa Maria Payá, immediately challenged that version, saying that the family had received information from the survivors that their car was repeatedly rammed by another vehicle. “So we think it’s not an accident,” she said, according to CNN en Español. “They wanted to do harm and then ended up killing my father.”

The family also said that Oswaldo Payá was targeted in a similar incident two weeks earlier in Havana. In retrospect, they now see that incident as a warning from the regime.

Why would the Cuban government regard Payá as enough of a threat to want him killed? He was one of the most prominent opponents of the Cuban dictatorship, a Catholic activist who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1988. He is best known for the Varela Project, a petition drive he launched in 2002 that called for free elections and other rights. That angered the Cuban government, which responded by forcing through the National Assembly a constitutional amendment making the communist system in Cuba irrevocable. It followed that with the 2003 “Black Spring,” arresting 75 of the most prominent Cuban activists that March.

But the government didn’t arrest Payá, because of the international renown that he had achieved. The European Parliament awarded him its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2002; that year he was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by hundreds of parliamentarians in a campaign led by his friend Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic president. Unlike Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and Liu Xiaobo of China, for whom Havel also campaigned, Payá never received the Nobel Prize. But he was an activist in the same mold — a centrist within the opposition, committed to nonviolence and reconciliation. Payá opposed the U.S. embargo against Cuba, for which he was criticized by some opponents of the Castro regime.

Although other activists had replaced Payá in recent years at the cutting edge of the Cuban democracy movement, he recently provoked the government on two issues of great sensitivity. In May, Payá broke a long silence when he sharply criticized an article in a lay Catholic publication that had defended the dialogue of the archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, with the regime and had attacked the cardinal’s critics. Payá accused the article’s authors of seeking to create “an artificial confrontation between the opposition and the church,” calling them “political commissars” who were asking “for a vote of confidence for Raul Castro’s government.”

Payá, the country’s most prominent Catholic voice, crossed a red line in challenging the government’s relations with the church, which had become a pillar of the government’s strategy of survival. He also did so at a time when the regime, emboldened by the cardinal’s silence at the mass arrests during the pope’s visit to Cuba in March, was not about to tolerate criticism.

Visiting Bayamo with foreigners — the two survivors of the crash were fellow Catholics from Spain and Sweden — crossed another red line. The city is the center of the cholera outbreak in the eastern part of Cuba, and for the regime, the disease is not just a medical problem but also an economic and political threat. The leakage of information about the outbreak threatens travel to Cuba and tourism, major sources of hard currency, which the regime desperately needs.

The spread of the disease also challenges Cuba’s self-image as a medical superpower and could arouse anger in citizens who believe that sending Cuban doctors to Venezuela and other countries detracts from the care they receive at home. The fact that Bayamo has experienced labor unrest the past two years and was a rebel stronghold during Cuba’s war of independence against Spain and the uprising against Batista further arouses the regime’s anxiety.

In the coming days, more facts are likely to emerge about Payá’s death. The testimony of the two survivors will be critical. As the United States and other democratic governments mourn Payá, it is essential that they — and world opinion — be alert to the dangers faced by democrats in Cuba. Without international solidarity, more martyrs are likely in the struggle for Cuban freedom.

The Cuban opposition: Castro would rather see them dead

From Tony Mendoza:

Oswaldo Paya, rest in freedom

From Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez:

Oswaldo Payá (1952 - 2012)

No one should die before reaching their dreams of freedom. With the death of Oswaldo Payá (1952 - 2012), Cuba has suffered a dramatic loss for its present and an irreplaceable loss for its future. It was not just an exemplary man, a loving father and a fervent Catholic who stop breathing yesterday, Sunday, but also an irreplaceable citizen for our nation. His tenacity shone forth since I was a teenager, when he chose not to hide the scapulars — as so many others did — and instead publicly acknowledged his faith. In 1988 his civic responsibility was forged in the founding of the Christian Liberation Movement, and years later in the initiative known as the Varela Project.

I remember — as if it were yesterday — the image of Payá outside the National Assembly of People’s Power on that March 10, 2002. The boxes filled with over 10,000 signatures in his arms, while he delivered them to the infamous Cuban parliament. The official answer would be a legal reform, a pathetic “constitutional mummification” that would tie us “irrevocably” to the current system. But the dissident of a thousand and one battles was not dissuaded and two years later he and another group of activists presented 14,000 more signatures. With them they demanded that a referendum be called to allow freedom of association, expression, and the press, economic guarantees, and an amnesty that would free the political prisoners. With the disproportion that characterized it, Fidel Castro’s government answered with the imprisonments of the Black Spring of 2003. Over 40 members of the Christian Liberation Movement were sentenced in that fateful March.

Although he was not arrested at that time, for years Payá suffered the constant surveillance of his home, arbitrary arrests, repudiation rallies and threats. He ever missed a chance to denounce the prison conditions of some dissident, or another wrongful conviction. I never saw him break down, or yell, or insult his political opponents. The great lesson he left us is his equanimity, pacifism, putting ethics above differences, the conviction that through civic action and through legal action, an inclusive Cuba is closer to us. Rest in peace, or better still, rest released.

23 July 2012

Oswaldo Payá was beacon of hope for Cuba

Oswaldo Paya

From Fabiola Santiago of the Miami Herald:

When Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas left the bayfront conference room at The Miami Herald on that clear winter day in January of 2003, many of the journalists gathered to meet him felt we had been in the presence of someone special — a human-rights stalwart with resolute ideas and the potential to lead Cuba into a peaceful, prosperous future.

I remember thinking that, after four-plus decades of dictatorship, this was the kind of leader Cubans deserved — an eloquent yet level-headed man whose force was not loud rhetoric or pandering, but an unflinching determination to make the powerful listen to the millions of Cubans on the island eager to see change.

Payá made a humble but impressive presentation of his Varela Project, a coordinated effort throughout Cuba to gather signatures to present at the highest levels of government asking for democratic reforms to the one-party system, respect for human rights and freedom for political prisoners.

He and followers of his Christian Liberation Movement had collected some 11,000 signatures and counting. Such a brave, massive undertaking was unheard of, and Payá was recognized by the international community in 2002 with the prestigious Sakharov Prize for the Freedom of Thought.

His brief visit to Miami was one of those rare moments of hope in the aftermath of the historic island tour of Pope John Paul II in 1998.

The Castro regime had allowed a prominent and respected dissident to leave the country and return. Later, with the harsh crackdown and arrest of 75 dissidents that Black Spring, a lot of hope dissipated. Yet Payá soldiered on with his peaceful activism.

Almost a decade later, Payá is dead at 60 — the second Cuban dissident leader to die within months and under questionable circumstances.

This admirable man who advocated peaceful change died Sunday in a car wreck that the Cuban government calls an “accident” but his family says occurred after another car purposely ran his off the road. He had received threats and his car had been run off the road before in Havana.

Last October, Ladies in White founder Laura Pollán, 63, died in a Havana hospital seven days after she sought medical attention for shortness of breath. Although her death was attributed to a respiratory illness, her family suspects foul play, as she had been pricked by something during one of the many attacks by Cuban police.

In what other country do two of the most charismatic leaders of a dissident movement die one after the other — in suspicious circumstances — and governance by police and mob club goes on as if nothing had occurred? In Cuba, where the name of the game is to buy the totalitarian regime’s aging leaders and their accomplices more time.

At Payá’s funeral Tuesday, some 25 dissidents — including Guillermo Fariñas, awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2010 — were kicked, clubbed, dragged and shoved into a bus, and detained in the outskirts of Havana to prevent them from attending the burial.

But inside and outside the church where Payá’s body lay in repose, the chants were heard as unshakeable as the man they honored: “¡Libertad! ¡Libertad!”