Cuban dissident who died feared for his life

Hundreds of mourners on Monday thronged the wake of dissident Oswaldo Paya, killed in a weekend car crash that relatives and friends charge was not an accident as Cuban authorities say. Paya, 60, was the second key dissident to die in a year. Cuban officials said he died in a car accident near the city of Bayamo, but close supporters -- foes of the Americas' only Communist regime -- say that Paya long feared for his life, and now they feared for theirs. "He had said they were going to kill him. And this was the third accident he had this year," charged Martha Beatriz Roque, a well known dissident economist. "Something has got to be done urgently so that this does not go any further," said Roque, who was among 75 dissidents rounded up tried and jailed in a 2003 crackdown before she was freed after Catholic church mediation. "We are all in danger," Roque insisted. In Washington, US President Barack Obama Monday lauded Paya's legacy. "The president's thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Oswaldo Paya, a tireless champion for greater civic and human rights in Cuba," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. "The United States will continue to support the Cuban people as they seek their fundamental human rights." But "this is a huge loss for us. We still have to follow in his footsteps," said Bertha Soler, leader of the Ladies in White group of relatives of political prisoners.\ Paya, an engineer and fervent Roman Catholic, founded the Christian Liberation Movement, a group pressing for political change in Cuba. He won international attention in 2002 when, on the eve of a visit by former US president Jimmy Carter, he presented Cuba's legislature with more than 11,000 signatures in support for an initiative calling for change in Cuba. Cuba was then still run by Fidel Castro, and Paya's move was a bold, landmark first confrontation between a citizen seeking wholesale change -- economic and democratic -- from within the existing political system. Paya won the European parliament's Sakharov prize for human rights later that same year. Yet his defiance of the Communist system did not bear fruit at home. When Carter mentioned Paya's project in a speech on Cuban state television, most Cubans, in a country with only official media, had never heard of it. The Cuban legislature ultimately rejected the initiative. Cuban authorities say Paya died when his rental car went off the road and hit a tree on Sunday, roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Bayamo. Another Cuban, Harold Cepero Escalante, who was an activist with Paya's group, was killed. Two other men with them were injured -- Spaniard Angel Carromero Barrios and Swede Jens Aron Modig, both 27. They were released from hospital Monday, diplomatic sources said, but did not immediately speak to media. In Havana, Paya's relatives and supporters called for an investigation. "The circumstances of the accident are not at all clear," the Christian Liberation Movement told AFP in an e-mail signed by spokesman Regis Iglesias. The group asked the "Cuban junta" to carry out a transparent probe. Paya's daughter Rosa Maria said the family did not believe the death was an accident, according to Miami-based Spanish-language newspaper El Nuevo Herald. "According to information we've obtained from people traveling with him, there was a vehicle trying to force him off the road... We don't think it was an accident," she said. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Paya's death "is profoundly heartbreaking and infuriating," and described him as "a man of extraordinary courage, conviction, and peace." He said that Paya's death "raise questions about the pattern of conduct by a despotic regime" that seeks to crush internal dissent. In Miami, many in the large Cuban-American community also questioned Paya's death. US Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban American mentioned as a potential Romney running mate, said it is "critically important the international community join those inside Cuba in pressuring the regime to be forthcoming with the truth." And Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-American head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, decried Paya's death as "an overwhelming loss to the Cuban people and their struggle for democracy." While the circumstances of the death were unclear, she charged that Paya and his fellow pro-democracy dissidents "had been harassed by Cuban state security authorities for decades."