Widow of Cuban dissident Payá wants to meet Carromero

Posted on Wednesday, 12.19.12
CUBA

Widow of Cuban dissident Payá wants to meet Carromero

Ofelia Acevedo, widow of dissident Oswaldo Payá, says she wants to hear
Spanish politician Angel Carromero's version of the car crash that
killed her husband.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

The widow of Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá said Tuesday she wants to
speak with Angel Carromero, the Spanish politician convicted of causing
her husband's death in a car crash, before he leaves the island to serve
the rest of his prison sentence in Spain.

Ofelia Acevedo's comments came after Payá's Christian Liberation
Movement (MCL) published several posts on Facebook over the weekend
repeating allegations that Cuban security agents bore responsibility for
the accident.

Acevedo said she plans to go to the Spanish embassy in Havana in the
next few days to ask that she and her daughter, Rosa Maria, be allowed
to meet with Carromero and hear his version of the crash before he is
sent to Spain.

Carromero was sentenced to four years in prison for vehicular homicide
for having been at the wheel of a rented car that crashed July 22,
killing Payá and MCL activist Harold Cepero. The Spaniard and Swedish
politician Jens Aaron Modig escaped with minor injuries.

The Spanish and Cuban governments announced last week that Carromero
will be allowed to return to Madrid soon under a 1998 bilateral
agreement that allows convicts from those countries to serve their
prison terms in their home countries.

Payá's family has said repeatedly that the crash was not Carromero's
fault and pointed to a string of unconfirmed reports indicating that
State Security agents who had followed Payá caused the crash by ramming
Carromero's car and forcing it off the road.

"We have been asking to speak with him since the crash took place,"
Acevedo told El Nuevo Herald on Tuesday by phone from her home in
Havana. "We are going to go to the embassy in the next few days to ask
again to speak to him before he leaves."

After most of the news stories on the Carromero repatriation agreement
last week failed to mention the accusations of a government hand in the
crash, the MCL published four posts on its Facebook page Saturday
providing a few new details and repeating some old ones.

The day before the crash, Carromero and Modig sent text messages to
friends in Europe reporting Payá was being tightly watched by security
agents, one post noted. Another said Carromero reported after the crash
that Payá was alive when he was pulled from the wreckage.

A third post alleged that Cepero arrived alive at a hospital but "was
allowed to die" because nurses were told he was a "terrorist." The Cuban
government often labels dissidents as "counterrevolutionaries" or
"mercenaries."

The digital Madrid newspaper El Confidencial, meanwhile, quoted
unidentified MCL members and supporters in Spain as saying that the
Spanish government had told them "we could not say anything that would
anger the Cuban dictatorship."

Opponents of the Cuban government have steadfastly alleged that the
conservative government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy cut a
deal with Havana to cover up any state security role in the fatal crash
in exchange for Cuba's cooperation in getting Carromero home early.

The Cuban government has made public a video recording of Carromero's
interrogation in which he makes no mention of any third-party
responsibility for the crash. Modig, who returned to Sweden a week after
the accident, has said he was sleeping before the crash and does not
remember what happened.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/19/3147978/widow-of-cuban-dissident-paya.html#storylink=misearch