One Woman’s Struggle against the Cuban Regime
International | August 1, 2021
On July 22, 2012, in the neighborhood of El Cerro in Havana, Cuba, Rosa María Payá said goodbye to her father as she would have on any other day, with a kiss on the cheek. But that day would not be like every other day.
After lunch, she received a series of muddled texts: An accident. Militia everywhere. Three people taken to the hospital. “Help!” She called her father’s phone. Over and over again. No answer.
Finally, around 4 p.m., someone picked up. Immediately, Rosa María called out: “Papá, papá, papá.” A female voice responded, stumbled, claimed to be a doctor. Finally, the voice said: “There has been a fatality.”
That was the moment when Rosa María Payá understood her father had been murdered by the Castro regime.
Her father was Oswaldo Payá, head of the Varela Project, which he launched in the late ’90s, proposing freedom of speech, association, religion, and press, along with free elections, free enterprise, and the release of political prisoners in Cuba…. Excerpts from the National Review)