Cuban dissident who died 'feared for his life'

Cuban dissident who died 'feared for his life'
Published on 24 July 2012 - 1:59am

Hundreds of mourners on Monday thronged the wake of dissident Oswaldo
Paya, killed in a weekend car crash that relatives and friends charge
was not an accident as Cuban authorities say.

Paya, 60, was the second key dissident to die in a year. Cuban officials
said he died in a car accident near the city of Bayamo, but close
supporters -- foes of the Americas' only Communist regime -- say that
Paya long feared for his life, and now they feared for theirs.

"He had said they were going to kill him. And this was the third
accident he had this year," charged Martha Beatriz Roque, a well known
dissident economist.

"Something has got to be done urgently so that this does not go any
further," said Roque, who was among 75 dissidents rounded up tried and
jailed in a 2003 crackdown before she was freed after Catholic church
mediation.

"We are all in danger," Roque insisted.

In Washington, US President Barack Obama Monday lauded Paya's legacy.

"The president's thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of
Oswaldo Paya, a tireless champion for greater civic and human rights in
Cuba," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement.

"The United States will continue to support the Cuban people as they
seek their fundamental human rights."

But "this is a huge loss for us. We still have to follow in his
footsteps," said Bertha Soler, leader of the Ladies in White group of
relatives of political prisoners.

Paya, an engineer and fervent Roman Catholic, founded the Christian
Liberation Movement, a group pressing for political change in Cuba.

He won international attention in 2002 when, on the eve of a visit by
former US president Jimmy Carter, he presented Cuba's legislature with
more than 11,000 signatures in support for an initiative calling for
change in Cuba.

Cuba was then still run by Fidel Castro, and Paya's move was a bold,
landmark first confrontation between a citizen seeking wholesale change
-- economic and democratic -- from within the existing political system.

Paya won the European parliament's Sakharov prize for human rights later
that same year.

Yet his defiance of the Communist system did not bear fruit at home.

When Carter mentioned Paya's project in a speech on Cuban state
television, most Cubans, in a country with only official media, had
never heard of it.

The Cuban legislature ultimately rejected the initiative.

Cuban authorities say Paya died when his rental car went off the road
and hit a tree on Sunday, roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Bayamo.
Another Cuban, Harold Cepero Escalante, who was an activist with Paya's
group, was killed.

Two other men with them were injured -- Spaniard Angel Carromero Barrios
and Swede Jens Aron Modig, both 27. They were released from hospital
Monday, diplomatic sources said, but did not immediately speak to media.

In Havana, Paya's relatives and supporters called for an investigation.

"The circumstances of the accident are not at all clear," the Christian
Liberation Movement told AFP in an e-mail signed by spokesman Regis
Iglesias.

The group asked the "Cuban junta" to carry out a transparent probe.

Paya's daughter Rosa Maria said the family did not believe the death was
an accident, according to Miami-based Spanish-language newspaper El
Nuevo Herald.

"According to information we've obtained from people traveling with him,
there was a vehicle trying to force him off the road... We don't think
it was an accident," she said.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Paya's death "is
profoundly heartbreaking and infuriating," and described him as "a man
of extraordinary courage, conviction, and peace."

He said that Paya's death "raise questions about the pattern of conduct
by a despotic regime" that seeks to crush internal dissent.

In Miami, many in the large Cuban-American community also questioned
Paya's death.

US Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban American mentioned as a potential Romney
running mate, said it is "critically important the international
community join those inside Cuba in pressuring the regime to be
forthcoming with the truth."

And Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-American head of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, decried Paya's death as "an overwhelming loss to the
Cuban people and their struggle for democracy."

While the circumstances of the death were unclear, she charged that Paya
and his fellow pro-democracy dissidents "had been harassed by Cuban
state security authorities for decades."
© ANP/AFP

http://www.rnw.nl/english/bulletin/cuban-dissident-who-died-feared-his-life-0