Cuban government was responsible for death of dissident Oswaldo Payá, human-rights group says

A decade after the death of leading Cuban opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, the top human rights group in the Western Hemisphere has concluded that Cuban state security agents were likely involved in a car crash that killed him and activist Harold Cepero, and that the Cuban government bears responsibility for his death.

In a report that ends an investigation opened in 2013, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, says the death July 2012 death of Payá, the founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, and Cepero was politically motivated in a context marked by state violence against human rights defenders in Cuba.

“Both were subjected to various acts of violence, harassment, threats, attempts on their lives, and finally, a vehicular crash that caused their death,” the commission wrote in a preliminary version of the report obtained by the Miami Herald. On Monday, the Robert F. Kennedy human rights organization, which legally represented Payá’s relatives, made public the Commission’s conclusions.

The commission said there is “serious and sufficient evidence to conclude that state agents participated in the death of Mr. Payá and Mr. Cepero, and in consequence, the Commission concludes that the State is responsible for the violation of the right established in Article I of the American Declaration to the detriment of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero.”

Article I of the Rights and Duties of Man, the first human rights international instrument adopted by the countries in the Americas in 1948, enshrines the “right to life, liberty, security and integrity of the person.”

In assigning responsibility to the Cuban state for their deaths, the commission said it focused the investigation on determining if “this illegal act has had the participation, support or tolerance of State agents or has resulted from a breach by the State of its obligation to reasonably prevent human rights violations, to seriously investigate to identify and punish those responsible and adequately provide reparations to repairing the victim or their relatives for the damages caused.”

The Commission found the Cuban government at fault on each of those benchmarks and called on Cuban authorities to offer reparations to compensate for the human rights violations and conduct a thorough criminal investigation to clarify the facts and punish those responsible.

The conclusions are vindication to Payá’s family, which for years has been insisting the car crash was the work of government security agents who had been harassing him for his political work opposing Fidel Castro. And it provides a rare instance of accountability in the international arena, where human rights violations by the Cuban government often get a pass thanks to Cuban authorities’ cunning diplomacy and propaganda efforts.

”After more than 10 years, the truth has prevailed,” said Rosa María Payá, Payá’s daughter. “Now it is official, as this IACHR decision shows, the Cuban regime murdered my father, Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero. Nothing can make up for the losses our two families suffered, but today we have taken a big step towards justice, which will only come when the legacy of democracy and freedom to which my father and Harold dedicated their lives is fulfilled in our country.”

The investigation’s conclusions, she added, are “not only a relief for our families who have fought so hard for the recognition of the truth but a victory for all Cubans who have been and are victims of the Castro dictatorship.”

At the time of his death, Payá, 60, had become one of the most visible leaders of the Cuban opposition movement after he founded the Christian Liberation Movement and collected signatures to present a referendum petition to the National Assembly. If approved, the petition. would have allowed Cubans to vote to oust the regime. Known as the Varela Project, the proposal was fiercely opposed by Castro, who changed the Cuban constitution to make socialism “irrevocable” and ordered the arrest of 75 dissidents in 2003, many involved in promoting the initiative.

According to the Cuban government, Payá and Cepero died in a car accident when the driver of the car they were in, Ángel Carromero, a young politician from the Popular Party in Spain, lost control of the vehicle near the eastern Cuba city of Bayamo and crashed into a tree. After Carromero was arrested, the Cuban government showed a video in which he denied reports that the car had been rammed from behind by another vehicle. He was sentenced to four years in prison for reckless homicide in a closed-door trial that Carromero later said was full of irregularities.

After the Spanish government secured his extradition in December 2012, Carromero repeatedly said that the car crash resulted from an attack by another car that had been following theirs and that the video in which he spoke was taken under duress.

“My first statement was that they had run us off the road and had hit us. This made them nervous, and they hit me,” Carromero told the Miami Herald board during a visit to Miami in 2014. “Later on, a Cuban official who introduced himself as an expert told me the version that I was to repeat: that I hit the brake pedal and fell into an embankment.”

In a hearing held by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in December 2021, Carromero said the same things he had told the Herald and wrote in his memoir Muerte bajo sospecha — Death under Suspicion: that he was forced to read the statement prepared by Cuban military officers and that the trial was “a farce.” He said his lawyers did not have access to the evidence, could not call their own team of experts, and the witnesses brought by the government gave contradictory testimony.

Payá’s family was not allowed to attend the trial. They never received a copy of his autopsy.

Another key witness in the case, Jens Aron Modig, a Swedish politician who was also in the car, has not talked about the accident, likely due to a “pact of silence,” Carromero said at the hearing. Modig was quickly repatriated to his country and has said he doesn’t remember the crash.

Carromero said that while he and Modig were being treated a Cuban hospital after the crash, Modig had texted his contacts in Sweden that their car had been rammed.

“How is it possible that a key witness to what happened did not participate in that trial?” Carromero asked during the hearing. “The key fact is that it was all a setup to cover up the attack the regime carried out against two of its main opponents.”

The new report says the Cuban government did not deny any of the claims made to the commission by Carromero and the Payá family. Cuba is not an active member of the Organization of American States, but because it was of its founding members, the commission argues that it can investigate and issue recommendations pertaining to human rights violations on the island.

The commission also heard testimony from Payá’s widow and daughter, who described the harassment of state security agents the family suffered for many years.

Ofelia Acevedo, Payá’s widow, said that because of her husband’s political activities, they were constantly followed and that state security agents threatened friends and family and placed microphones at their home in El Cerro, a neighborhood in Havana.

“But it was not until recent years that the persecution and harassment grew intensely, and we suffered several attacks,” she said. “On at least three occasions, they loosened the lug nuts on our car’s wheels... On June 2, 2012, a car came out of nowhere and hit our car, causing it to overturn and fall on the opposite side of the road.”

They came out of that accident unharmed, she said, but “it became clear to us that they were trying to annihilate us.”

A month later, Payá was dead.

His legacy remains alive, his daughter, Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, said during the 2021 hearing. She has continued her father’s work through Cubadecide, another referendum initiative seeking democracy in Cuba, and has become one of the faces of a younger opposition movement.

“The regime failed in its attempt to eliminate my father’s legacy. We see it in the young protesters of July 11,” she said in reference to the island-wide anti-government demonstrations in July 2021. “I believe that the citizenry, the opposition, the civil society, today’s leaders, we are standing on his shoulders.”