ONE OF Cuba’s most prominent dissidents has been killed in a car crash that his daughter claims was “not an accident.”
Oswaldo Paya, a long-standing critic of the Castro dynasty and the winner of the Sakharov human rights prize, died of injuries after his car hit a tree in Bayamo, Granma province, on Sunday.
A fellow Cuban democracy activist, Harold Cepero, was also killed, while two visiting European politicians – Angel Carromero and Jens Aron Modig – were injured.
Details of the crash remain sketchy and contentious. Rosa Maria Paya, the dissident’s daughter, said the vehicle was deliberately rammed.
“There was a car trying to take them off the road, crashing into them at every moment. So we think it’s not an accident,” she told the Spanish service of CNN.
The Cuban government’s international press centre reported that the rental car carrying the four men simply lost control.
A clearer picture is likely to emerge when Mr Carromero – a Spaniard – and Mr Modig – a Swede – are released from hospital, where they received treatment for light injuries.
News of Mr Payo’s death prompted widespread mourning for an activist behind several of the most influential democracy initiatives of the past two decades. In the 1980s he founded the Christian Liberation Movement and in the 1990s began work on the Varela project, demanding freedom of expression, assembly and other civil rights. – (Guardian service)