In Spain, the truth starts to come out about Paya "accident"

In My Opinion

Fabiola Santiago: In Spain, the truth starts to come out about Paya
"accident"
By Fabiola Santiago
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

At long last, Angel Carromero has broken his silence from the confines
of his negotiated parole status in Spain.

He was the woozy-eyed Spanish political activist seen from Havana on a
prosecutorial videotape issuing an unconvincing mea culpa that he was
driving too fast, that he was at fault for the deaths of two prominent
Cuban dissidents in a car crash last summer.

Carromero's "trial" for the deaths of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero was
Cuban political theater at its best, a closed-door concoction to cover
up wrongdoing — state-sponsored murder? — a tactic Cubans in exile know
too well.

With Carromero now back in his homeland, the light of truth — tenuous
but illuminating — has begun to shine on the deaths of human rights
champion Payá and Cepero, the young activist who accompanied the
respected leader on a trip across the island to spread the message of
peaceful, democratic change.

The car crash in which Payá and Cepero lost their lives on July 22 was
no accident, Carromero told Payá's family in Spain this week. Another
vehicle rammed the car Carromero was driving and forced it off the road,
he said.

While Payá and Cepero, the ones seriously hurt, were left in the car,
men in a third car took away Carromero and Swedish politician Jens Aron
Modig, another human rights activist accompanying them.

"We don't know what happened to my father and [Cepero] … but hours later
they were both dead," Payá's daughter, Rosa María, told El Nuevo Herald
after her conversation with Carromero.

The Cuban government contends that Payá died instantly and that Cepero
died a few hours later in a Bayamo hospital. But they have refused to
allow anyone to see the autopsy reports.

Modig, at first detained along with Carromero, was allowed to return to
Stockholm after Carromero issued his mea culpa. He has remained silent
as the Spanish government negotiated Carromero's return to Spain to
serve out his Cuban sentence.

In Cuban custody, the only way to survive is to outsmart the jailers.
Carromero and Modig did what they had to to secure their way out of Cuba.

But it's time now to speak up and tell the truth — and for the
governments of the European Union, Latin America and the United States
to push for an international investigation of the car crash and its
aftermath.

In a parliamentary hearing Thursday, Spanish government leaders admitted
under pressure that they're in a tenuous situation with Cuba because
four Spanish citizens remain in Cuban prisons and they're negotiating
those releases as well. It sounded almost like an admission of blackmail.

Payá and Cepero deserve justice.

Both men had been accosted by pro-government mobs, were constantly
followed by state security, and had been repeatedly threatened. In fact,
Payá didn't make trips outside of Havana because of the danger, but in
the Europeans' company he felt a measure of safety.

A state-sponsored murder is a serious charge, but this is nothing new
for a government with a record of dealing violently with the peaceful
opposition.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/01/3262014/fabiola-santiago-in-spain-the.html#storylink=misearch