Odds and ends

• The Alan Gross case has provoked a lot of discussion for nearly five years, but until this new star of the Cuban opposition movement came along, it didn’t occur to anyone that Mr. Gross’ precarious health is apt for ridicule. Yesterday, “Let Alan rot!” And later, a joke on Twitter: “Alan Gross will be taken soon from Cuba to Africa to fight Ebola: if he survives, he'll be free. If he dies, USAID will take him to U.S.” If you set out to discredit the opposition movement from within, could you do any better?

• VOA: Cuban doctors practicing in U.S.-built hospitals in Liberia. Wait ‘til the Helms-Burton purists get on this one…

• Speaking of Helms-Burton, the President of Bacardi (!) talks about investing and doing business in Cuba when the embargo is lifted, without mentioning the law’s myriad conditions.

• El Nuevo Herald: In Miami, dissident Guillermo Farinas talks about the state of the opposition movement, the parts he views as legitimate and not, and he tells of his fear for his life. He also says, without naming names, that someone in Miami tried to buy him off and did the same with Oswaldo Paya years ago. Paya’s widow says it isn’t true. Farinas came to Miami to attend a workshop on human rights and nonviolent action.

• At the UN, how the Obama Administration defends the embargo.

• A top USAID official slams the Times for failing to note Cuba’s responsibility for jailing Alan Gross. Don’t hold your breath waiting for USAID to admit responsibility for sending him into a predictable disaster.

• Aron Modig, the Swede who was in the car in which Oswaldo Paya was killed, slept through the whole thing, and remembers nothing, is now a member of Parliament. The Herald recently asked the driver, Angel Carromero, about Modig; Carromero said: “There were times when he was asleep but he was the copilot. If he chose to remain quiet and turn the page, well I don’t share in that sentiment. I respect it but I’ve chosen a more complicated road and one with worse consequences for me but I couldn’t stay silent.”

Odds and ends

·         As the 15^th round of Colombia peace talks proceed in Havana, Juventud Rebelde gives ample coverage to the Colombian government’s complaint that the guerrillas are dragging their feet and trying to add extraneous items to the agreed agenda.  Cuba acts as “guarantor” in the talks.

·         Herald: Panamanian officials say that some of the aircraft engines on the North Korean freighter seized in Panama were “brand new.”  They also say that “friends overseas” tell them that Cuba and North Korea have an arms trade agreement of uncertain scope; that the North Korean crewmen in detention are happy campers (air conditioning, clothes, food, cigarettes, time for soccer every day); and that while the crew have spoken to investigators they have declined to sign statements.

·         An “updating” of Cuba’s criminal justice procedures took effect October 1 and was explained by officials on a Mesa Redonda program.  Relatively minor offenses that had been handled in provincial courts will now be heard in municipal courts.  For certain minor offenses prosecutors will have discretion to impose administrative penalties (fines) rather than go to court to seek a prison sentence, although a defendant can insist on a court trial if he wishes.  The impact seems to be a streamlining and a shift of caseload to lower courts and, depending on how prosecutors use their discretion, lesser penalties for minor criminal offenses.

·         Canadian professor Steven Kimber makes the case for the Cuban Five in the Washington Post.

·         AP on the clash between el exilio and more recent Cuban immigrants.

·         Who’s investing in Cuba?  A smart B-School student figures it out at the bar at the Hotel Nacional.

·         Granma on the art of base stealing through the years.

·         EFE: The family of Oswaldo Paya, now living in Florida, acquires Spanish citizenship.

·         AP: A ceremony in the Colon cemetery in Havana to commemorate the terrorist downing of the Cubana airliner in Barbados in 1976.

·         In the National Interest, a look at the past and the future of Cuba’s intelligence services, “punching above their weight.”  The authors link to this interesting U.S. assessment (pdf): “Cuban Subversive Activities in Latin America, 1959-1968.”

·         In an advice column for Congress, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson owns up to his bumbling in Havana in 2011.

Paya case going nowhere in Spanish courts

The effort to have Spanish courts take on the case of Oswaldo Paya is not going well.

Paya’s family asked Spanish courts to commute the sentence of Angel Carromero, the Spanish Partido Popular activist who drove the car in which Paya and fellow dissident Harold Cepero were killed last July.  A judge turned down that request.  The final decision rests with the government, which does not seem disposed to commute.

Separately, the family asked a court to re-investigate the case and find two Cuban officials guilty of murder based on Carromero’s charge that his car was rammed and driven off the road.  Last week, a court turned down that request too (background here, see also article in El Pais, the judge’s decision, and EFE in English).  The family indicated that it would appeal the decision.

I don’t know how much room for maneuver the Spanish courts and executive would have in this case in the event that they were to find the family’s political and legal arguments convincing.  What comes through in these decisions is that in bringing Carromero home under the bilateral prisoner exchange agreement, the Spanish government – and, apparently, by extension its courts – seems to have accepted the Cuban verdict on Carromero as a settled matter (“firme”) and finds no reason, no basis, and no jurisdiction to re-open the case.  In last week’s decision, the judge said it would be “abusive” to assert Spanish courts are competent to re-investigate. 

Abusive or not, and taking Spain and Cuba out of the equation, it is hard to see how any  prisoner exchange agreement could function if one party would use it to bring prisoners home and then declare the foreign verdicts invalid and release the prisoners. 

One can’t fault Carromero for wanting to get out of jail in Cuba and go home.  But by coming home under that agreement he appears to have wrecked any chance he might have had to make his case in Spanish courts.  If his idea from the beginning was to charge that his car was rammed – something he only began to say after months back in Spain – then it seems that the place to make that argument would have been in Cuba, with whatever risk that would entail.  The Washington Post rises above all this to argue that Spanish courts have every reason to take up the case.

In this new radio interview, Carromero says that had he done so, he “might not have gotten out alive and my message would not have gotten out of the island.”  He reminds listeners that he was “only 26” when all this happened, and he whines about how he was covered in the Spanish media.  Based on that coverage, he said, he decided to give his first public statement to the Washington Post editorial page.  Asked why his companion, Swedish activist Aron Modig, has offered no support and no statements, Carromero says little and notes that Modig has “mysteriously” left politics.  The interview by Luis del Pino also provides fodder for those who argue that behind Carromero’s statements there is an intra-party rivalry playing out between Carromero’s champion Esperanza Aguirre and Prime Minister Rajoy, who is being accused of passivity and appeasement.

No commutation for Carromero

A Spanish court declined to commute the sentence of Spanish Partido Popular activist Angel Carromero, who was convicted of vehicular homicide in connection with the crash near Bayamo of the car he was driving in which dissidents Oswaldo Paya and Harold Cepero were killed (EFE).  He is serving out his sentence in Spain and is currently out of jail and wearing an ankle bracelet.  The court noted that his loss of his driver’s license is “intimately related” to the events that resulted in his conviction, and that he has not shown remorse for those events. 

Separate from this court action, the Paya family is asking a Spanish court to re-investigate the crash based on its allegation that Carromero is not responsible and that it was a “murder” perpetrated by the Cuban government.

The Paya case in Spanish courts

The widow and daughter of Oswaldo Paya filed a legal action in a Spanish court alleging that Paya’s death was a “murder” and a “crime against humanity.”  They charge that a Cuban government car drove Paya’s car off the road on July 22, 2012 when driver Angel Carromero was taking Paya, fellow dissident Harold Cepero, and Swedish political activist Jens Aron Modig from Havana to Santiago. 

The action, called a querella, is directed against two Cuban military officials.  Paya’s Spanish citizenship enables it to be presented in Spanish court.  They ask the court to take testimony from themselves, Carromero, Modig, four witnesses in Cuba, associates of Paya in Spain, and finally from Spanish and Swedish party activists whom they say received messages from Carromero and Modig after the crash.

It is not clear whether the matter will proceed; this Radio Marti report says that the court has handed the matter to a prosecutor, “who will decide whether or not the querella is to be admitted.”

The querella alleges that the Cuban trial that found Carromero guilty of vehicular manslaughter was a “farce” intended to paint the crash as an accident caused by negligence on Carromero’s part.  The government’s purpose, it charges, was “to do away with the Christian Liberation Movement and also to eliminate the possibility that any dissident movement would receive aid from abroad, which would cause the disappearance of any current or future ideological threat to the dictatorial regime that governs the island.”  (BBC, El Mundo)

Carromero was convicted in criminal court in Bayamo last October.  (The sentencia from this Cuban trial is described here and here; the full document doesn’t seem to be on the web.)  He returned to Spain last December under a Cuban-Spanish agreement that allows convicts to serve out their sentence in their home country.  Carromero remained silent for months.  Finally in March, with Paya’s associates chiding him for remaining silent, he gave statements to the Washington Post editorial page in which he alleged for the first time that a government car had driven him off the road.  He stayed away from Spanish media.

Modig has consistently said that he was asleep and remembers nothing about the crash.

Carromero is now speaking out, accusing the Cuban government of killing Paya and Cepero.  He began with this interview with El Mundo, saying that “I am just one more victim of the Paya case,” which takes some considerable cheek considering that he is alive and two Cubans are dead.  He said that Modig “has declared that he remembers nothing” ever since they were in the hospital together in Bayamo.  He mentions being sedated in the Bayamo hospital, but he does not make reference, as he did according to numerous press accounts last January, to having to recompose his memories because of long-lasting memory-inhibiting drugs allegedly administered to him in Cuba.  He also repeats that when he asked Paya about the car that was behind them, Paya told him it was “de la comunista” and he should ignore it.  (If anyone knows what that means, or has ever heard a Cuban use that phrase, I’m all ears.)

When he spoke later to the Herald, Carromero added that in the Bayamo hospital, he gave a statement to the effect that he was driven off the road, and signed that statement, only to be pressed into changing it by officials who slapped him and told him that he risked a long time in jail if he didn’t change his story. 

In this interview on Spanish television, Carromero says that various cars had followed his car, when one finally drove it off the road when he was going about 60 kilometers per hour.  Carromero said he is “sure” that Paya and Cepero were alive after the accident, although he doesn’t seem to have said in any interview that he saw them alive.

The basis seems to be his statement to El Mundo that a priest and nurses told him that Cepero and Paya were both “admitted” to the hospital in Bayamo. 

In this interview (with audio), Carromero starts by asking listeners “to realize that everything that happened, happened to a young person of 26 years of age.”  He said that he knows Paya was alive because a priest called the hospital from Madrid to say that all four in the car “were in the hospital.”

In an interview with a Spanish radio station, Paya’s brother Carlos claims that Modig’s statement that he remembers nothing is “a lie.”  Asked why Modig would lie, Paya said, “He has his reasons.”  He said he has talked with Modig, and Modig’s memory is “very selective.”  Paya says that Modig sent a text in Swedish after the accident saying, “literally, Angel tells me that a car drove us off the road.”

There’s much more if you care to sift through the statements of Carromero, his friends, and Paya’s family and associates.

Whom to believe?

Like me, you may be recalling the great movie about reasonable doubt, 12 Angry Men, that boiled down to Henry Fonda peppering his fellow jurors with the question, “Isn’t it possible?”

Isn’t it possible that Cuban government operatives drove Carromero off the road, intentionally or because someone who was assigned to follow got too close?  Yes, it is.

It’s also possible that a Swedish Christian Democrats wanted to help Cuban dissidents by sending Modig, who speaks no Spanish; they needed a Spanish speaker, and to their great misfortune they got the jejune Carromero, whose driver’s license was in the process of being revoked and who, at the wheel in a grueling, day-long drive across Cuba, made a mistake that cost two dissidents their lives.

To date the Paya family’s case has not been strong, suffering from piecemeal presentation, Carromero’s months of silence and his weak performance since, and Modig’s assertion that he remembers nothing in a car that was allegedly being followed, harassed, and rammed while he supposedly slept. 

If the querella proceeds in Spanish courts, it may shed light on parts of this story, especially since Carromero has only faced light and sympathetic questioning in his Spanish media interviews.  Apart from the witness testimony and evidence presented, it would be interesting to see whether Cuban evidence and the Cuban verdict come into play, whether Cuba would cooperate in what would essentially be a re-trial of the Bayamo proceeding, whether the Spanish government plays a role or takes a position, and what procedures and standard of proof would be used to reach a judgment. 

More:

·         Spanish law professor Enrique Gimbernat argues that if Spain vacates the Cuban sentence against Carromero, it will harm the Spanish national interest because other countries will no longer honor agreements with Spain whereby Spaniards who commit crimes abroad are permitted to serve out their sentences at home.    Carromero responded by saying that the Spanish government signed a memorandum with Cuba reserving the right to pardon him, requiring only that Spain inform Cuba of that act.

·         In CubaEncuentro, Alejandro Armengol supports additional investigation of the case and cuts the Cuban government no slack.  He goes on to explain the Spanish political context of Carromero’s statements.  Carromero has been championed by and strongly supports Partido Popular leader Esperanza Aguirre, a party rival of the politically troubled Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.  Armengol suggests that Aguirre may have unleashed Carromero at a moment when his statements would cause the most damage to Rajoy.