The Wall Street Journal's Mary A O'Grady asks "How Did Oswaldo Payá Really Die?"

Rosa María Payá Acevedo, daughter of Oswaldo Payá

THE AMERICAS

How Did Oswaldo Payá Really Die?

New evidence about the car crash that killed a noted Cuban dissident points to a coverup.

By Mary Anastasia O'Grady / The Wall Street Journal

When someone is killed in a civilized country and police slap around a witness and suppress evidence it is known as a cover-up. In Cuba it's called "reform." Viva Orwell.

Cuba's "ministry of truth" wants the world to believe that the Castro brothers are abandoning the use of state repression to maintain power. The Jay-Z-Beyoncé glam-tour of Old Havana last week was designed to help with the effort. But new details of the events surrounding the July 2012 deaths of prominent pacifist Oswaldo Payá—the winner of the European Parliament's 2002 Sakarov prize—and another dissident, Harold Cepero, suggest the opposite.

The U.S. press has reported on the March testimony of Ángel Carromero, the Spaniard who was driving the car that the two dissidents were riding in just before they died. Mr. Carromero was released from a Cuban prison in December and returned to Spain. He says that a red Lada had been tailing him and that the crash occurred because their car was rammed by another vehicle. He also claims that when he told this to Cuban authorities, they struck him, more than once.

But that's not the half of it. In an interview on Thursday at the Journal's offices, Payá's daughter, Rosa Maria, told me: "I must say that when I talked to Ángel, I didn't learn anything new. He confirmed things we already knew. We had the text message. We already knew that a car hit them from behind intentionally."

What she knew came straight from the mouth of Cuban police Capt. Fulgencio Medina, who took testimony from witnesses and read it aloud at the hospital in the eastern city of Bayamo where the victims were brought from the crash. Payá family friends were there, identified themselves as the family's representatives and reported by telephone back to Havana.

But the family was then denied access to that police report. The family was also denied the right to an independent autopsy, and they were told that all refrigeration chambers at all the hospitals in the area had broken down, so an autopsy had to be done immediately.

Doctors who were friends of the family were not allowed into the Bayamo hospital to inspect the body. The Payá family was denied a request for seats on a flight from Havana to Bayamo. The family has also been denied a copy of the autopsy report.

Putting Mr. Carromero on trial and hushing up the rest seemed like a tidy resolution. But the problem for the regime, says 24-year-old Ms. Payá, is "that in Cuba everyone talks."

The family has many friends in the Bayamo area and a few of those friends managed to get inside the hospital before the military locked it down; other sources who told them things seem to work there. "Our friends in the hospital talked a lot with the police in those first moments."

Ms. Payá says that the government never officially notified her family of the death of her father. But at the hospital Capt. Medina read the witness statements "in front of my friends and other cops and nurses, doctors."

The witnesses told of a red Lada, the same make and color of a suspicious car that Mr. Carromero described. They described seeing the occupants of the red Lada taking the foreigners [Mr. Carromero and Swedish politician Aaron Modig] out of their car almost immediately. The Spaniard was saying "Who are you? Why are you doing this to us?"

The statements did not say if Ms. Payá's father was "dead or alive," Ms. Payá told me. "But the witnesses said Harold [Cepero] was asking for help. I don't know if out loud or with his hands but they said he was touching his chest. So we know he was alive and conscious." Why then, Ms. Payá wants to know, did hospital personnel tell her family's friends that he was "brain dead," when they saw him lying on a gurney in a general area not receiving any form of intensive trauma care?

There is something else interesting about Capt. Medina's report of witness testimony, according to those who heard him read it: There was no mention of the car being smashed against a tree. This jibes with the testimony of the foreigners, who both have said that there was no crash with a tree.
Ms. Payá says that a journalist permitted to observe the trial on closed-circuit television told her that Capt. Medina testified against Mr. Carromero and never mentioned the red Lada or the questions witnesses had heard him ask as he was taken from the car.

This was supposed to be an open and shut case, with the emphasis on the shut. But now that the contradictions have become public knowledge, the regime's story is taking on a distinct odor. This is bad for the ministry of truth. Eight U.S. senators led by Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) have called for an investigation. Ms. Payá, who will return to Cuba next week, is worried about the safety of her family, and probably for good reason.

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In Defense of Mohandas Gandhi and the efficacy of nonviolent resistance

A saint who considers himself superior to a sinner forfeits his sainthood and becomes worse than the sinner, who unlike the proud saint, knows not what he is doing. - Mohandas Gandhi

I have never, even in my dream, thought that I was mahatma (great soul) and that others were alpatma (little soul). -Mohandas Gandhi


Andrew Roberts’ March 26, 2011 Wall Street Journal review titled “Among the Hagiographers” of Joseph Lelyveld’s book "Great Soul" about Mohandas Gandhi is more of a polemic against both the Indian independence leader and the power of nonviolent resistance then a book review. There is much to respond to in the review but will focus on criticism of Gandhi’s claim that nonviolent resistance could work against the Nazis. In August 6, 1940 Mohandas Gandhi published a letter from “a Dutch friend” in which his friend argued that:

“Through Nazism, the German youth has lost all individuality of thought and feeling. The great mass of young people has lost its heart and is degraded to the level of a machine. … A friend of mine, whose work it is to cross-examine German prisoners of war in England, was deeply shocked by the spiritual narrowness and heartlessness of these young men, and agreed with me that non-violence could not be applied with any success against such robots...”

Gandhi responded to the letter pointing out that the author had sent his name and address but that he (Gandhi) withheld both out of fear that harm would come to him if they were made public. Gandhi responded:

“Non-violent action, if it is adequate, must influence Hitler and easily the duped Germans. No man can be turned into a permanent machine. Immediately the dead weight of authority is lifted from his head, he begins to function normally. To lay down any such general proposition as my friend has, betrays ignorance of the working of non-violence.”

University Academics Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic on Nonviolent Conflict" compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. Finally there study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.” This also depends on the nonviolent opposition movement having a strategic vision and maintaining its non-violent posture even under the worse repression.



Looking back there are two high profile examples that indicate that Mohandas Gandhi was right.

Between 1940 and 1945 under the Nazi occupation of Denmark many Danes were able to organize an effective and completely nonviolent resistance that undermined German war fighting capability and successfully blocked efforts to deport and exterminate its Jewish population to the Nazi death camps by first hiding Danish Jews then ferrying them out to neutral Sweden.

An equally dramatic case took place in Germany in February and March of 1943 when German (non-Jewish) wives married to Jewish men and their relatives organized mass demonstrations in Rosenstrasse Street in Berlin to protest their husband’s arrest and deportation escalating until the men were released and returned home.

Both episodes indicate that nonviolent resistance to Nazism was possible and raises the disturbing question of what horrors might have been avoided if Gandhi’s call to non-violent resistance to the Nazis in the 1930s had been heeded:

"But the Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa. The Jews are a compact, homogeneous community in Germany. They are far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa. And they have organized world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man."

The attacks against Mohandas Gandhi continue because his political philosophy is relevant in today's world and offer's individuals the insight into the real nature of power which is that of the individual giving or denying his or her obedience to a central authority and the great power that signifies over tyrants and dictators of all ideological stripes.

In reality Gandhi needs no defense because as Michael Nagler points out at the Metta Center blog: "Gandhi had a genius for turning apparent setbacks in to opportunities. I have a feeling he’s going to do the same with this one."

Zapata Lives by Mary O'Grady

August 2, 2010

Castro forces dissidents to accept exile as the price of release from his dungeons.

The announcement last month that Cuba would exile 52 political prisoners currently in jail was supposed to help repair the regime's international image in the wake of the death of Orlando Zapata.

It's not working. The 21 who have already arrived in Spain are speaking out about the hell hole run by Castro that is Cuba. And at least 10 are refusing to leave the country. Zapata lives.

In December 2009, Zapata, who had been rotting in a rat-infested prison cell and repeatedly tortured for almost seven years, launched a hunger strike on behalf of Cuba's prisoners of conscience. He was protesting the unjust incarceration of nonviolent dissidents and the cruelty inside the dungeons. The regime desperately tried to break him, even refusing him water for a time. This led to kidney failure and his death on Feb. 23.

AFP/Getty Images

Cuban political prisoner Óscar Elías Biscet

Zapata's passing sparked international outrage, and on July 7 the regime yielded to the pressure. It agreed to release the independent journalists, writers and democracy advocates who had been jailed during the 2003 crackdown on dissent, known as the Black Spring.

Yet only the naïve could read Castro's forced acquiescence as a break with tyranny. It is instead a cynical ploy to clean the face of a dictatorship. It is also an effort to reclaim respectability for the world's pro-Castro politicians, including Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos. No one understands this better than the former prisoners.

Those sent to Spain have not hidden their joy about getting out of Cuban jails. "There are no words to fairly describe how amazed and excited I was when I saw myself free and next to my wife and daughter again," Normando Hernández González told the Committee to Protect Journalists in a telephone interview. But Mr. Hernández, an independent journalist, hasn't minced words about Cuban repression either.

In a telephone interview with Miami's Radio Republica, he talked about his "indescribable" time in jail. "It's crime upon crime, the deep hatred of the Castro regime toward everyone who peacefully dissents. It is a unique life experience that I do not wish upon my worst enemy."

The regime tried to spruce up the former prisoners by dressing them in neatly pressed trousers, white shirts and ties. But they brought tales of horror to Spain. Ariel Sigler, a labor organizer who went into prison seven years ago a healthy man but is now confined to a wheel chair, arrived in Miami on Wednesday.

These graphic reminders of Castro's twisted mind have been bad for Mr. Moratinos's wider agenda, which is to use the release of the prisoners to convince the European Union to abandon its "common position" on Cuba. Adopted in 1996, it says that the EU seeks "in its relations with Cuba" to "encourage a process of transition to pluralist democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as a sustainable recovery and improvement in the living standards of the Cuban people." Mr. Moratinos's desire to help Fidel end the common position is a source of anger among Cuban dissidents.

The former prisoners also resent their exile, after, as Mr. Hernández puts it, "being kidnapped for seven years." He explained to Radio Republica: "The more logical outcome would be, 'Yes, you are freeing me. Free me to my home. Free me so I won't be apart from my sister, from my family, from my people, from my neighbors.'" Instead he says he was "practically forced" to go to Spain in exchange for getting out of jail, and to get health care for his daughter and himself.

Cuba's horrendous prison conditions are no secret. In his chilling memoir "Against All Hope" (1986, 2001), Armando Valladares cataloged the brutality he experienced first hand as a prisoner of conscience for 22 years. A steady stream of exiles have echoed his claims. But another bit of cruelty is less well understood: For a half century the regime has let political prisoners out of jail only if they sign a paper saying they have been "rehabilitated" or, when the regime is under pressure, if they agree to leave the island. Getting rid of the strong-willed, while being patted on the back for their "release," has been Castro's win-win.

Now some prisoners are refusing to deal. Ten of the 52, including Óscar Elías Biscet, famous for his pacifism, say they will not accept exile as a condition of release. These brave souls remain locked up.

Of course, if they are released and allowed to stay home, the same "crimes" that landed them in prison are likely to do so again. A particular hazard for dissidents is Article 72 of the Orwellian Cuban criminal code, which says that "any person shall be deemed dangerous" if he has "shown a proclivity to commit crimes demonstrated by conduct that is in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality."

Cuban dissidents claim there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of prisoners locked up for "dangerousness," "contempt" and other crimes of dissent. No one knows for sure. But shipping a few dozen out of the country doesn't qualify as a step toward civilized government. The memory of Zapata demands much more.

Write to O'Grady@wsj.com