Miami Rep. Giménez invites Cuban activist Rosa María Payá to State of the Union address
Cuban pro-democracy activist Rosa María Payá will join Miami Republican Carlos Giménez in Washington as his guest at the State of the Union address to be delivered by President Joe Biden on Thursday in an effort to highlight the situation of political prisoners on the island, the congressman says.
Payá is the daughter of the late Cuban opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement and was killed in a car crash believed to be a politically-motivated assassination in 2012.
Exiled to Miami after the dissident’s death, she has continued her father’s work advocating for human rights and democracy on the island. Building on her father’s signature initiative, the Varela Project, Payá has continued promoting the idea of conducting a vote called a plebiscite in Cuba that would potentially pave the way for democratic changes.
Giménez, a former Miami-Dade mayor, said Payá would join him “to denounce the ongoing brutality of Cuba, demand freedom for all political prisoners, and hold the regime accountable for its crimes against humanity.”
Though some details of what happened to Oswaldo Payá are still unknown — for example, the Cuban government has never released his autopsy report — a decades-long investigation by the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights concluded that the Cuban government bears responsibility for his death and that evidence pointing to the involvement of Cuban state security agents in the crash was “serious and sufficient.”
Last week, Payá’s widow, Ofelia Acevedo, filed a civil lawsuit in Miami against Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador who has agreed to plead guilty to charges of acting as an unregistered agent of Cuba, including at the time of Payá’s death.
“My family is fighting for the truth, for justice, and to end the impunity of the Cuban regime and its accomplices, just as we have been doing since my father’s assassination in 2012,” his daughter said.
This week, another prominent Cuban dissident, Martha Beatriz Roque, was honored at the White House with the International Women of Courage Award, but the Cuban government did not allow her to attend.
Giménez contrasted his invitation to the young human rights activist to a recent trip to Cuba by Democratic U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal of the state of Washington and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, chair and deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whom he accused of acting as “apologists” of the Cuban government. Days after their February trip, they urged the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. They also said they had raised human rights issues with Cuban officials.
“I am proud to stand with Rosa María to continue to loudly denounce the evils of the Cuban regime,” Giménez said.