In Cuba, Oswaldo Payá's name lives on

In Cuba, Oswaldo Payá's name lives on
Efforts to improve human rights, rule of law continue after dissident's
death
Posted: July 17, 2013
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

I waited in a queue of hundreds of mourners marching past the coffin
below the chief altar. It was a deadly hot July day. The parish of El
Salvador del Mundo in the Cerro municipality of Havana held a funeral
wake for the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement Oswaldo Payá,
1952-2012.

I looked at Payá's face. His left cheek was bruised. He was lying there
- the man whom the Cuban exile accused of adherence to the Castro
ideology due to his endeavor to achieve a peaceful transition to
democracy "from law to law," one that would redeem the truth and
wouldn't end up in a mock exchange of one military leader for another,
this time wearing a suit and tie. Payá was also criticized by opposition
members for defending his convictions too vehemently - a virtue they
mistook for authoritarianism. His corpse was now lying there in
solitude, so typical of martyrs.

I thought of the young MCL leader, Harold Cepero, who lost his life with
Payá. At that moment I felt as if he had looked at me, guiltily, without
opening his dead eyes. The heavy curtain of his eyelids has been dropped
forever.

I had an overpowering vision inspired in a speech I had just heard, a
speech made by Payá's daughter, Rosa Maria (even younger than the
deceased lad). Despite going through great pain, she announced quite
calmly to the world that her father had been assassinated after decades
of receiving threats and living under constant surveillance. To support
her indictment, she also mentioned the text messages sent by the two
survivors of the fake "accident" to their home countries, Sweden and Spain.

In my vision, Oswaldo Payá was taken out of the car he was traveling in
and was put on an in situ trial by a military tribunal. He was sentenced
to death without having a chance to defend himself. The
commander-in-chief of the revolution, who had never forgiven Payá for
living a free and happy life, thus completed the old personal vendetta
against a man who was able to gather more than 25,000 signatures against
the regime, a man who spoke fearlessly and without hatred in his heart
upon receiving the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize, a man who had
won nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize - the award that Fidel Castro
used to covet before he became a senile old man.

Quiet tears ran down my cheeks, and it was impossible to control them. I
wouldn't say I felt sad; I was just devastated. I realized that what
started out as a guerrilla movement with barbaric executions without
trial long before 1959 has now ended up in an assassination ordered by
the government. And businessmen from the free world keep counting and
recounting the money they are planning to invest here in the island to
become saviors of the last leftist utopia in the world.

It should be noted that the Varela Project of the Christian Liberation
Movement, whose idea was to reduce the tyranny of the totalitarian
regime by forcing the government to comply with its own laws, is still
valid, and no Cuban official will ever gain legitimacy unless the
National Assembly of People's Power complies with the legislative
provisions and acknowledges the lawfulness of this public petition,
which has been delivered to it in compliance with the Constitution. The
Varela Project is Payá's legacy that will survive both Castro brothers
as well as their successor: the capitalism without human rights that
they are currently testing in Cuba.

It is quite possible that the crime will go unpunished in terms of the
law. Yet, the lives of Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá, regardless of
whether they were ended as I envisioned or in any another cruel way,
have become a kind of a gospel, a heritage shared by all Cubans
symbolizing their desire to burn all violence perpetrated by the State
on a pile of green uniforms of State Security executioners.


- Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is

a journalist and blogger living in Cuba.

Source: "In Cuba, Oswaldo Payá's name lives on - Opinion - The Prague
Post" -
http://www.praguepost.com/opinion/16744-in-cuba-oswaldo-payas-name-lives-on.html