A Call for Justice on what should have been the 61st birthday of Oswaldo Payá

"They have told me that they will kill me before this regime ends, but I will not flee." - Oswaldo Payá

Oswaldo Payá and his family celebrating

Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas was born in Havana in the neighborhood of the Cerro 61 years ago on February 29, 1952. He should be celebrating his 61st birthday today surrounded by friends and family but his life was cruelly taken away on July 22, 2012.

Despite the Orwellian efforts of the Castro regime to cover up the extrajudicial killings of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero Escalante, the truth has a way of coming out. Regime agents had spent decades threatening to kill him and had told Oswaldo that he would not live to see the end of the dictatorship. They kept their promise. Now they try to silence Oswaldo's family threatening them with death if they do not let go of the effort to discover what really happened to their loved ones, but they refuse to be silenced.

The Cuban intelligence service, trained by the East German Stasi, has a track record of using car accidents to target activists and those that it disagrees with. Today, Rosa Maria Payá Acevedo, after meeting with one of the survivors of the incident, Angel Carromero, confirmed that the car crash in Bayamo on July 22, 2012 was not a car accident and that a second car was involved.

Furthermore that both Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero Escalante survived the accident. The Cuban government's version is that Oswaldo Payá died immediately and that Harold Cepero died later at the hospital. The dictatorship put on a Stalinist show trial and found the Spanish driver guilty of causing the accident that led to the two Cubans deaths.

Through a series of diplomatic maneuvers the Spanish government reached an agreement with their Cuban counterpart and Angel Carromero is back in Spain completing the prison sentence imposed by a Cuban court under dubious circumstances by a legal system that is neither impartial or independent of the political will of the regime.

Therefore the Spanish government has one option open to obtaining justice for all parties involved. End its agreement with the Cuban government and investigate the deaths of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero, gathering evidence, identifying those responsible and holding them accountable before a court of law that is impartial and provides justice. Does the death of a human being and the mistreatment of a Spanish citizen in what appears to be a conspiracy by a dictatorship not matter to the government of Spain? Impunity cannot be allowed to prevail in the case of Oswaldo and Harold.