An eyewitness to Oswaldo Payá's death speaks out

An eyewitness to Oswaldo Payá's death speaks out
By Editorial Board, Published: March 5

IN OCTOBER 2003, the Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá wrote a letter from
Havana to his mentor Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president and
one-time dissident playwright who fought to throw off communist rule. At
the time, Mr. Payá's hopes for greater freedom in Cuba were being
crushed by Fidel Castro in a wide-ranging crackdown. Dozens of his
friends and colleagues were being thrown in prison. "I still live in an
environment formed by the culture of fear that the communist regime
generates throughout society," Mr. Payá lamented in his letter.

Nearly nine years later — on July 22, 2012 — Mr. Payá, 60, was killed in
a car accident in Cuba's eastern Granma province near the town of
Bayamo, along with another activist, Harold Cepero. Both were passengers
in the back seat of a rented vehicle. Mr. Payá's family has challenged
the official version of the crash: The car was speeding and skidded into
a tree. Today, we publish answers to questions we posed to the man who
was at the wheel that day, Ángel Carromero, who was imprisoned and
convicted of vehicular homicide in Cuba after the crash. Mr. Carromero,
27, vice general secretary of Spain's ruling Popular Party, was released
to Spain in December to serve out his term, and he speaks out here for
the first time since leaving Cuba.

His words are a testament to Cuba's enduring "culture of fear." Mr.
Carromero offers a grim, detailed account of how the car was rammed from
behind by a vehicle bearing Cuban government license plates; he says
this caused the fatal crash. Mr. Carromero alleges that he was then
drugged and interrogated and his life was threatened. Under duress, he
appeared in a video made by Cuban authorities. "No other vehicle hit us
from behind," he said on the tape. But the video was a sham. Mr.
Carromero says he was repeating words written in a notebook by a Cuban
officer for him to read and that he was forced to sign a confession that
bore no resemblance to what happened.

The Carromero story is a nightmare: a sudden impact from behind,
mysterious injections, incarceration in a cell infested with cockroaches
and stern warnings to repeat official lies. Mr. Carromero says he had
gone to Cuba on his own and was driving that day to help a human rights
champion, Mr. Payá, who had won the European Union's Sakharov Prize and
was nominated by Mr. Havel for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Mr. Payá's
family has asked Mr. Carromero to speak out. "When they asked me for the
truth, I didn't want to hide it," he told us. His decision is a
courageous tribute to the principles of Mr. Payá.

FROM HIS youth, Mr. Payá was independent of mind and spirit. He declined
to become a member of the Communist Youth League and in 1968 was alone
in his class in refusing to support the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring. That cost Mr. Payá three
years in a labor camp, but he never failed to be inspired by the example
of Czechs and Slovaks, as well as Poles and Hungarians, who resisted
oppression. An engineer and a Catholic, he visited Prague years later,
after the end of Soviet domination, and he recalled in the letter to Mr.
Havel, "It was like traveling to the future and finding proof that
liberation is possible."

In search of that liberation, Mr. Payá pioneered the Varela Project, a
petition in 2002 seeking a national referendum to guarantee freedom of
expression and association, amnesty for political prisoners and free
elections. The petition drew more than 11,000 signatures and shook Mr.
Castro's regime to its core — resulting in a crackdown in which dozens
of signers of the petition were sent to dungeons. Mr. Payá was not
imprisoned then, but his family recalls he was under constant
surveillance. Just two months before he died, there was another
suspicious accident in which a car came out of nowhere in Havana and hit
theirs. Mr. Payá was injured slightly.

Last summer, when the car Mr. Carromero was driving went out of control,
the Cuban authorities must have concluded that they had finally silenced
Mr. Payá and would hear no more about him. They probably figured they
had intimidated the young Spaniard into silence, too. But they failed.
We now have an eyewitness account that strongly suggests Mr. Castro's
agents sought to kill Mr. Payá and then attempted to cover up the murder.

The only proper course of action is to convene an international
investigation that can be truly independent and untainted by the Castro
regime's thuggish ways. The legacy of Mr. Payá must be to expose the
truth of his death, and to put that truth on display for all to see,
especially the people of Cuba, for whom Mr. Payá aspired to nothing less
than the right to live free from tyranny.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/an-eyewitness-to-oswaldo-payas-death-speaks-out/2013/03/05/b4e0676a-8598-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_print.html