Cuba: Up to 50 arrested at Payá funeral, family and supporters insist his death was no accident

Miami Herald ^ | July 24, 2012 | Juan O. Tamayo

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá was buried Tuesday as police dragged off and allegedly beat at least 40 supporters who shouted “Freedom!” after his funeral mass, in a clash watched by a large and impassive crowd in Havana.

Relatives and supporters voiced new allegations that Payá was killed in a car crash caused by another vehicle, but a Madrid newspaper reported the Spaniard at the wheel of the car carrying the dissident told police the accident was his fault.

Police detained 40 to 50 dissidents, and beat some of them severely, as more than 300 people left the El Salvador del Mundo church Tuesday morning and started the funeral procession to the Colón Cemetery, said Havana human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez..

Among those reported “brutally beaten” was dissident Guillermo Fariñas, winner of the 2010 European Parliament’s Sakharov price, which Payá won in 2002. Several had been released by Tuesday evening, Sánchez told El Nuevo Herald.

A video of the confrontation showed hundreds of passersby watching in stony silence. One woman is heard off-camera shouting “Viva Fidel!” But she does not get the usual “Viva!” response from the crowd and someone tells her, “No one is paying attention to you.”

.... The Cuban government described it as a one-car accident and Spain’s El Mundo newspaper reported Tuesday, without identifying its sources, that Carromero, who was at the wheel, told Cuban police he missed a sign to slow down on a curve, lost control and went off the road.

Payá’s son Oswaldo told journalists Tuesday, however, that the Europeans phoned their bosses in Sweden and Spain Sunday “to say that a truck hit them, crashed into them, rammed them several times until it drove them off the road.”...

[Cincinatus' Wife]

[JimSEA]

The murder of this great man and the imprisonment of his compatriots is par for the Marxist course. I see where we are expected normalize relations soon with Cuba.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/26/2913296/cuba-marks-59th-anniversary-of.html

” HAVANA — Cuban President Raul Castro said Thursday that his government is willing to mend fences with bitter Cold War foe the United States and sit down to discuss anything, as long as it is a conversation between equals.

.......Days after Paya’s death, Raul Castro had harsh words for the island’s opposition, accusing them of plotting to topple the government.

“Some small factions are doing nothing less than trying to lay the groundwork and hoping that one day what happened in Libya will happen here, what they’re trying to make happen in Syria,” Castro said.

.....Musicians sang the song “Guantanamera,” and a young girl read a speech paying homage to the revolution and resistance to “Yankee” imperialism.

“We will be like ‘Che,’” she said, repeating the mantra taught to schoolchildren across the island. Argentine-born guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara is held up as a model of personal conduct in Cuba.”