His words are a testament to Cuba’s enduring “culture of fear.” Mr. Carromero offers a grim, detailed account of how the car was rammed from behind by a vehicle bearing Cuban government license plates; he says this caused the fatal crash. Mr. Carromero alleges that he was then drugged and interrogated and his life was threatened. Under duress, he appeared in a video made by Cuban authorities. “No other vehicle hit us from behind,” he said on the tape. But the video was a sham. Mr. Carromero says he was repeating words written in a notebook by a Cuban officer for him to read and that he was forced to sign a confession that bore no resemblance to what happened.
The Carromero story is a nightmare: a sudden impact from behind, mysterious injections, incarceration in a cell infested with cockroaches and stern warnings to repeat official lies. Mr. Carromero says he had gone to Cuba on his own and was driving that day to help a human rights champion, Mr. Payá, who had won the European Union’s Sakharov Prize and was nominated by Mr. Havel for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Mr. Payá’s family has asked Mr. Carromero to speak out. “When they asked me for the truth, I didn’t want to hide it,” he told us. His decision is a courageous tribute to the principles of Mr. Payá.
FROM HIS youth, Mr. Payá was independent of mind and spirit. He declined to become a member of the Communist Youth League and in 1968 was alone in his class in refusing to support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring. That cost Mr. Payá three years in a labor camp, but he never failed to be inspired by the example of Czechs and Slovaks, as well as Poles and Hungarians, who resisted oppression. An engineer and a Catholic, he visited Prague years later, after the end of Soviet domination, and he recalled in the letter to Mr. Havel, “It was like traveling to the future and finding proof that liberation is possible.”
In search of that liberation, Mr. Payá pioneered the Varela Project, a petition in 2002 seeking a national referendum to guarantee freedom of expression and association, amnesty for political prisoners and free elections. The petition drew more than 11,000 signatures and shook Mr. Castro’s regime to its core — resulting in a crackdown in which dozens of signers of the petition were sent to dungeons. Mr. Payá was not imprisoned then, but his family recalls he was under constant surveillance. Just two months before he died, there was another suspicious accident in which a car came out of nowhere in Havana and hit theirs. Mr. Payá was injured slightly.
Last summer, when the car Mr. Carromero was driving went out of control, the Cuban authorities must have concluded that they had finally silenced Mr. Payá and would hear no more about him. They probably figured they had intimidated the young Spaniard into silence, too. But they failed. We now have an eyewitness account that strongly suggests Mr. Castro’s agents sought to kill Mr. Payá and then attempted to cover up the murder.
The only proper course of action is to convene an international investigation that can be truly independent and untainted by the Castro regime’s thuggish ways. The legacy of Mr. Payá must be to expose the truth of his death, and to put that truth on display for all to see, especially the people of Cuba, for whom Mr. Payá aspired to nothing less than the right to live free from tyranny.
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