Cuba's Fidel Castro: didn't expect to live to 87

[MADem]

121. He was more than "locked out"--he was murdered by the state.

Mr. Payá was no friend to the Castro-hating Cuban contingent, either--he refused to take a dime from them, and wouldn't let them use him to their ends. He was, indeed, a 'patriot,' and he was murdered by the Castro regime for his trouble.

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/07/25/requiem_for_a_cuban_patriot

Oswaldo Payá was a Cuban patriot, best known for his spearheading the Varela Project, named after a famous Cuban clergyman and independence advocate, which used provisions of Castro's own constitution to challenge the lack of basic civil and human rights in Cuba, for which he collected some 11,000 signatures on the island.

Humiliated, the regime could not do anything but expressly violate its own constitution by ignoring Payá's petition and staging yet another mass mobilization to convince no one "the people" were united behind the Castro regime. For this effort, Payá was awarded the European Union's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Payá, a devout Catholic, was his own man, beholden to no one. He was never cowed by the regime's incessant harassment and intimidation tactics, and he would diverge from prevalent thought in the Cuban exile community. He once wrote in the Miami Herald, "Lifting the embargo won't solve the problems of the Cuban people. Maintaining it is no solution, either."....In this country, one hopes that Payá's sacrifice can have some effect on the thinking of critics of U.S. policy. Payá was everything their caricature of Cuban dissidents was not; he did not receive official U.S. support, he would criticize U.S. policy and exile opinion when he believed it necessary, and he tried to affect reform working within the system -- something even former President Jimmy Carter supported.

And still it did not protect him from the regime's wrath. The question those critics ought to be asking themselves now is, where do we go from here?