State-Sponsored Murder in Cuba?
On the evening of July 22, a string of revealing text messages and phone calls circulated between Cuba, Sweden and Spain and back to Cuba — where Oswaldo Payá, one of the country’s bravest and most influential dissidents, was lying dead on a rural highway. That, anyway, is the story of Regis Iglesias Ramirez, an associate of Payá and former political prisoner who says he is determined to expose what he believes was a state-sponsored murder.
Iglesias, who was released into exile in Madrid two years ago and visited Washington last week, said he was contacted that evening by a Spanish Christian activist named Cayetano Muriel, who in turn had been called by Annika Rigo, a Swede who heads the Christian Democratic International Center in Stockholm. Iglesias says he was told that Rigo had received a text message from Cuba saying that a young Swedish Christian Democratic activist, Jens Aron Modig, had been in a terrible accident: A car in which he was riding had been followed and forced off the road by another vehicle. The text said three people from the car had been transported to a hospital, and one was missing.