Quotable

“Raul commented that now they want what happened in Libya, or what they want to happen in Syria, to happen here.  But he warned that this is a peaceful little island, we like to dance and make friends with everyone, including the United States, but this is a stubborn little people and if they want confrontation it is better in baseball, where sometimes we win and sometimes we lose, but not in other things.”

   – From Granma’s coverage of Raul Castro’s remarks today in Guantanamo

Paya's farewell

Cardinal Ortega gave Paya’s funeral mass in Paya’s neighborhood in Havana, bringing together two Catholic figures that had their differences in recent years, especially as the church has taken a larger role in Cuba’s political debate and undertaken a greater dialogue with the government.  The Cardinal’s complete homily is here in Spanish and Progreso Weekly covers it in English.

The funeral mass and procession to the cemetery were joined by members of the opposition, and there was a strong police presence.  Even though it was, to say the least, an assembly that the opposition didn’t choose to convoke, the security forces arrested about 50 and released them by morning (BBC, Herald).  Reacting to the arrests, author Zoe Valdes, writing from Paris, decries what she views as the lack of courage of the Cuban people, dripping with contempt for those she left behind.

Here are notes on Paya’s passing from Espacio Laical and Palabra Nueva.  And here are reflections from Mauricio Vicent in El Pais, Arturo Lopez Levy, and Andres Oppenheimer in the Herald, and the New York Times obituary. 

About the accident (Updated x2)

The awful crash that claimed Oswaldo Paya’s life led immediately to questions about its cause, fueled mainly by statements by Paya’s own family to the effect that another car forced Paya’s car off the road (see BBC today, and his daughter’s statement yesterday). 

The Cuban government has added nothing to the statement it delivered Monday, which said that according to witness statements, the car “went out of control and crashed into a tree.”  [Update: On July 27 the Interior Ministry issued the results of its investigation.]

Here a roundup from other press reports:

AFP reports, based on a “Spanish Embassy source” in Havana, that the Spanish activist Angel Carromero, 27, was the driver of the car and remains under questioning in Bayamo with a Spanish consular officer nearby.  The source said that the investigative process is “within the norm” given that Carromero was driving and two of his passengers died.  The Swedish activist Aron Modig, also 27, was released and appears not to have given statements to police “given that he remembers nothing” of the crash, according to the same source.

A team of Reuters reporters filed this, noting that Carromero could face criminal charges:

“We have serious doubts that it was an accident,” Rosa Maria Paya, one of the activist’s three daughters, told Reuters.  “But we do not know for sure what happened,” she added.

European diplomats said that while Modig had returned to Havana and was free to fly home, Carromero, who was driving the vehicle, remained in Granma as of Monday night, and faced possible charges for reckless driving and involuntary manslaughter.

The diplomats, who asked not to be identified, said it appeared the vehicle, traveling at well above the speed limit, hit a large pot hole, veered off the road and hit a tree.

The diplomats said that so far there was no evidence to back up the allegations by Paya’s daughter.

The diplomats said the Cuban government had met with both country’s ambassadors and expressed a desire to work out the incident.

Human rights monitor Elizardo Sanchez sent two activists to the scene.  Based on their reports, Sanchez said that there appears to be no other car involved and “the facts indicate a lamentable accident” occurred.  (See Diario de Cuba and an article today from Europa Press.)  Sanchez also says that the definitive word from the Carromero and Modig will only come when they are outside Cuba.

Café Fuerte has photos of the car taken from the Facebook page of a local Cuban reporter.

In a story carried this morning in El Mundo, EFE reports that Carromero gave statements to the effect that he failed to see a sign that orders drivers to reduce their speed, he lost control, and the car went down an embankment.  The story is datelined Madrid and is sourced to “Spanish diplomatic sources.”  El Mundo reports separately from Havana, in a loosely phrased passage based on “non-official” sources, that Carromero lost control on a tight curve.

Radio Marti reports that Paya wrote his brother last June after a car accident in Havana that left him with the sense that it was “very probable” that “they tried to kill not just me but also my family.”

Update:  More on all this in today’s Herald, including claims that Carromero and Modig phoned their offices on Sunday to say that they were being pursued by another vehicle, and in Carromero’s case, to say that their car was hit by a truck and driven off the road.  In Chile, a Cuban opposition activist believes that if Carromero admitted failure to heed a traffic sign then his statement is the result of “coercion;” he goes on to explain that such a statement would ensure that a criminal case would proceed and result in one to 10 years jail time.

Update:  The Herald reports on Paya’s widow’s account of a call she got from the investigator, and of messages from Carromero and Modig to colleagues in Europe where they said their car was rammed by another.  Penultimos Dias has a quick transcript of her statement, and the audio.

Oswaldo Paya, R.I.P.

He was genuine, no one ever doubted that.  

Oswaldo Paya was a devout Catholic, a patriot, an engineer who worked at his government job repairing medical equipment, a Cuban who could not imagine leaving Cuba and instead opted to stay and try to change it.

His Varela Project, carried out by the Christian Liberation Movement that he led, was a petition drive that was unique among the initiatives undertaken by Cuba’s dissidents in that it successfully enlisted large-scale citizen participation.  The project took advantage of a provision in Cuba’s constitution that allows a bill to be presented for debate in the National Assembly if 10,000 registered voters bring a petition to that effect.  It proposed an expansion of civil and economic rights and release of political prisoners, and it was delivered to the National Assembly in 2002, eventually with 25,000 signatures.

The Varela Project drew criticism.  Fellow dissident Rene Gomez Manzano, a former law professor, wrote that it was invalid because it sought changes to Cuba’s constitution, something not permitted by the constitution’s citizen initiative provision.  More important, it drew criticism from other dissidents and from many in Miami who oppose the idea of working within Cuba’s governing structures to effect change. 

The initiative was rejected by the National Assembly.

The arrest and imprisonment of 75 dissidents in 2003 focused in large part on the Christian Liberation Movement, the network that circulated the petition and gathered the signatures.  When Paya met visiting U.S. legislators in his home in subsequent years, he always invited wives of these prisoners to speak on their husbands’ behalf.  He opposed the U.S. embargo but preferred always to talk about the political issues that in his view mattered the most, i.e. those that need to be settled among Cubans alone.

R.I.P.

(Photo from European Parliament website.)

The news of Oswaldo Paya's death

Oswaldo Paya died in a car accident yesterday afternoon in Granma province, 22 kilometers outside the city of Bayamo.  He was traveling with his colleague Harold Cepero Escalante of Ciego de Avila, who also died, and with two European visitors who both survived: Spanish Partido Popular activist Angel Carromero and Swedish Christian Democratic activist Aron Modig.

A Cuban government spokesman last night said that the group was in a rental car that went out of control and struck a tree (AP report here).  Paya’s daughter told Radio Marti (audio clip in the story) the following:

The information that reached us from the guys who were traveling in the car with him, there was a car trying to get them off the road, running into them all the time.  So we believe that this was not an accident.

Granma carried the story, calling it a “lamentable accident.”

In Madrid, a colleague of Carromero said he suffered a head wound that required three stitches and is “well.”

Spain’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying that both Europeans are “out of danger,” and that the Spanish government “is gathering from Cuban authorities all the pertinent information.”  Spain’s consul general in Havana is going to Bayamo, where the survivors are hospitalized.

Revenge of the nerds

New customs duties will go into effect in September and apply to goods carried or shipped into Cuba by individuals.  The losers will be those Cuban entrepreneurs who depend on imported supplies and the couriers outside who profit by carrying supplies into Cuba, not to mention the public that receives these goods for their own use.  Potential winners are the state stores that carry imported goods that entrepreneurs and the general public desire. 

Given the amount of commerce that takes place, one would think that the Cuban government would establish stores of its own, well stocked, that would take business away from Ño Que Barato, Home Depot, and many other stores in Miami, Mexico, and elsewhere that serve the Cuban market. 

But that has hardly been accomplished, so for now the new duties will raise the costs and crimp the growth of that part of the entrepreneurial sector that depends on imported supplies – unless, that is, those who send goods in from abroad send the same volume of goods and absorb the new costs themselves.  Doubtful. 

Café Fuerte has posted the issue of the Gaceta Oficial that includes the new norms –  good luck reading them. 

Café Fuerte reporter Ivette Leyva provides the most complete explanation of the measures that I have seen.  She says that 20 kilograms of personal luggage remains exempt, and so does medicine.  Those who import goods valued above 50 Cuban pesos will pay a duty of 10 pesos per kilogram above 20 kilograms.  That’s ten Cuban pesos for Cubans resident in Cuba traveling once per year; if they travel more than once per year the duty is denominated in convertible pesos, as it is for Cubans residing abroad and for foreigners.  As for those who receive packages shipped from abroad, packages of up to three kilograms are exempt, and for packages above that weight they will pay a duty equal to the value of the goods.

AP reports that the ten convertible peso per kilogram duty represents a twenty-fold increase.  BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg refers to the amount of parcels bought from Cuba through revolico.com; this business stands to be wrecked by the new duties.  The Herald covers the story here.

Absent repeal of these duties, the only way that the adverse impact on the entrepreneurial sector can be neutralized would be for state stores to expand their supplies, in-store and on-line, and to expand its initial moves toward bulk pricing of goods needed by entrepreneurs.  But those things won’t happen overnight.  In whatever debate took place over these measures, the winners were those who put a higher priority on short-term revenue gain than on job generation.

Reuters' Marc Frank rounds up the (negative) local reaction here.

(Photos refer to the e-commerce site of the Carlos III mall in Havana.) 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Washington to Havana via Palestine (Updated)

Thanks to Café Fuerte, I ran across articles and a set of e-mails that detail a gambit in the case of jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross that reaches to Palestine and involves a freelance Israeli negotiator and Gross’ attorney. 

One participant, the Israeli, confirmed that the e-mails are authentic.  Others have been silent, so it is impossible to know if all the details are correct.

According to the story, the deal was that Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, would urge Cuba to release Alan Gross, and in return for his release or for Abbas’ efforts, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen would desist from blocking USAID money destined for Palestine.  The proposal did not work out, although the e-mail trail stops before any reporting of Cuba’s response.  After Abbas’ efforts, the Congresswoman lifted her objection to the release of half the money, although it is not known whether she was motivated by Abbas’ action or by other factors.

The story from the Ma’an News Agency is here and the e-mail trail is published here.

Update: Today’s Herald story here including comment from spokesman for Rep. Ros-Lehtinen.

Plaza San Francisco

"Guinea pigs" in the "pressure cooker"

Looking ahead to the U.S. election, blogger Yoani Sanchez asks whether the United States should “raise a fist or offer a hand” to Cuba.  Whoever wins, she says, will encounter a changing Cuba, and the key issues to be resolved are among Cubans themselves.  Her discussion of U.S. policy is a little elliptical, but when she says that the embargo-forever crowd sees Cubans on the island as “guinea pigs” in a “pressure cooker,” her views are clear enough:

With the increased cash from remittances, the small businesses that emerged from Raul Castro's reforms were able to use the money coming from the north for start-up capital and to position themselves. Meanwhile, thousands of Cuban-Americans arrived at José Martí airport every week loaded with packages, medicine and clothes to support their relatives on the island.

Those who see the Cuban situation as a pressure cooker that needs just a little more heat to explode feel defrauded by these “concessions” to Havana from the Democratic government. They are the same people who suggest that a hard line – belligerence on the diplomatic scene and economic suffocation – would deliver better results.

Sadly, however, the guinea pigs required to test the efficacy of such an experiment would be Cubans on the island, physically and socially wasting away until some point at which our civic consciousness would supposedly "wake up." As if there are not enough historical examples to show that totalitarian regimes become stronger as their economic crises deepen and international opinion turns against them.

Your tax dollars at work

Great Western Malting Co. of Vancouver, Washington has paid a $1.3 million fine for selling barley to Cuba through a foreign affiliate, a transaction that would have been legal had it done so directly from the United States with a Treasury Department license.  Treasury’s description of the case is posted here (pdf).  (H/t Cubadebate.)

Raul in Moscow

Raul Castro continues his foreign travel in Moscow, where he met President Putin and the two looked for ways to deepen economic ties.  Putin sent his regards to “our great friend” Fidel Castro.

His visit to Vietnam, EFE reports, included discussions of increased economic cooperation but no details were disclosed. 

More interesting, judging from this report and this one, it looks as if the American Secretary of State and the President of Cuba may have coincided briefly in Hanoi and missed a chance to meet.  Maybe next time.

Odds and ends

·         A Florida foreign policy update, a little late: The state law that bars companies that do business in Cuba from bidding on state and local government contracts was blocked by a federal court, and the state law that bars the use of state university funds for academic travel to Cuba was allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court.

·         FT’s John Paul Rathbone on a 1959 Errol Flynn documentary, Cuban Story, recently rediscovered and released in Britain.

·         New York Times: A derrumbe in Brooklyn.

·         The New York Times on rock climbing in Vinales.