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An unsilenced voice for
change
A conversation with
Oswaldo Payá
From The
Economist print edition. Dec 14th 2005.
Few things endanger dictators as much as
the free exchange of ideas. Maybe that is
why Fidel Castro's communist government
refused to allow Oswaldo Payá, Cuba's
most prominent dissident, an exit visa to
let him talk at a conference of European
NGOs in London on December 8th. Mr Payá's
treatment should cause European governments
to reflect on whether their current policy
of constructive engagement with Cuba makes
sense.
Between 2001 and 2004, Mr Payá's
movement gathered 25,000 signatures in a
vain attempt to persuade Cuba's National
Assembly to change the constitution to allow
multi-party democracy. Activists of his
Christian Liberation Movement made up more
than two-thirds of the 75 dissidents and
journalists rounded up and jailed for long
terms in April 2003.
Unlike some other dissidents, Mr Payá
refuses help from the United States. He
opposes the American trade embargo against
the island and the Bush administration's
recent decision to set up a "Cuba transition"
desk at the State Department. Speaking by
telephone from the British embassy in Havana
last week, he reiterated his commitment
to peaceful democratic change. "We
want to launch a transition programme within
Cuba, one without revenge or radical leaps
but rather one of reconciliation,"
he said.
Mr Payá argues that most Cubans
want democratic rights and freedoms. What
holds them back, he says, is not just fear
of the regime. They also fear change. For
that reason, he says, a transition to democracy
should not force ordinary Cubans to return
their houses to the people who owned them
before the 1959 revolution.
Most of Mr Payá's family are in
exile. His house in Havana is watched by
security police. He works as a technician
in Cuba's health service. His prominence
seems to offer some protection-in 2002 the
European Parliament awarded him its Sakharov
prize for human rights. The wives of the
jailed dissidents were joint winners of
the prize this year, but were denied exit
visas to collect it this week.
This year, at the urging of Spain's Socialist
government, the EU dropped the mild diplomatic
sanctions it slapped on Cuba after the round-up
of dissidents. An Ibero-American summit
in Spain in October condemned the American
embargo but said nothing about Cuba's lack
of political freedom. Spain is "complaisant"
with Mr Castro's regime, Mr Payá
says. "We need a campaign of support
and solidarity with peaceful change in Cuba"
of the kind that brought an end to apartheid
in South Africa and to the Pinochet dictatorship
in Chile.
That is the message that Mr Payá
would have delivered in London. It would
have shamed all those in Europe who put
their disagreements with American foreign
policy above their support for Cuba's beleaguered
campaigners for freedom.
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