The Latin American Report # 524

One of the more insane political maneuvers of the Trump administration came to fruition yesterday, Friday, with the election of exiled Cuban Rosa María Payá as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which is part of the decrepit OAS system. Payá was publicly endorsed by Marco Rubio, the head of Foggy Bottom, demonstrating once again the influence, the muscle of the Cuban-American electorate in achieving major victories in Washington.

We are talking about the daughter of Oswaldo Payá, perhaps the most formidable internal enemy Fidel Castro ever faced within Cuba’s fragmented and U.S.-dependent "opposition." Payá was the driving force behind a constitutional reform project—Varela—that was even introduced in Cuba’s parliament in 2002. Rather than confronting the proposal head-on—letting it gather dust—the Cuban political leadership fast-tracked a referendum to constitutionally cement socialism as untouchable.

As far as we know, this effort was openly supported by the U.S. government through the National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of the NED's core institutes, which, in my view, made it blatantly illegal and anti-Cuban. For example, in my records from the now-defunct USAID's Foreign Aid Explorer, which was merged into ForeignAssistance.gov but with significant losses of relevant data, the NDI provided funding for three consecutive years for activities related to the so-called Varela Project.

In fiscal year 2002, $50,000 was allocated "to work with the Varela Project leader, Oswaldo Payá, and his allies outside Cuba in building international, multiparty support for the Varela Project." The following fiscal year, nearly $200,000 was set aside to promote the initiative, while in 2004, funding was directed toward:

[strengthening] the ability of advocates to increase international awareness of and support for the Varela Project. NDI will expand the International Committee to Support the Varela Project with activities that will include disseminating information about Varela Project activities, organizing conferences and meetings, and providing technical assistance to democratic activists in Cuba.

If this does not embody a blatant example of foreign interference in a country’s internal affairs, then nothing does. Yet, despite committing the original and cardinal sin of Cuba’s so-called dissidence—seeking support from Washington—, Oswaldo Payá could at least be considered a "decent" man, probably the last to hold a leadership role among those historically opposed to the Cuban Revolution. He died about 13 years ago in a controversial accident that some accounts blame on Cuban security forces, though the government officially attributed it to reckless homicide by the driver, a Spanish citizen. The IACHR itself found the Cuban state "guilty."

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Thus, this history—and only this history—is what Rosa María Payá has to her name in practice. Her nomination and imposed election—Trump-style, club in hand—exemplifies the turning of U.S. foreign policy into a mockery. This woman, also a protégée of former OAS Secretary Luis Almagro, knows nothing about international law, human rights, political theory, democracy, and the like, as meekly acknowledged by an independent panel evaluating IACHR candidates. She did, however, claim familiarity with "American legislative lobbying processes." That's true, as she usually advocates maintaining and reinforcing the already comprehensive U.S. sanctions regime against "her" people in Cuba.

From her new post at the IACHR, Payá is expected to continue deploying harsh, direct rhetoric against the Latin American "axis of evil" (Cuba-Nicaragua-Venezuela), while assisting Rubio in his crusade against the hiring of Cuban doctors in the region—a campaign that falls precisely under the purview of this very organization. So, the OAS is a walking corpse, and we'll likely never mention Payá again here, but this latest Trump-admin absurdity deserved to be called out somehow.