Her Father’s Daughter

Rosa MaríaPayá is the daughter of OswaldoPayá. Many NR readers are familiar with him. I’ll provide a brief refresher.

He was a great Cuban democracy leader, and one of the greatest in the world. He founded the Christian Liberation Movement. And he spearheaded the Varela Project, a petition drive aimed at winning basic democratic rights for Cubans.

In 2002, he received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, given by the European Parliament.

He was well-known across the world, obviously. But not enough to protect him. They killed him in 2012. The regime killed him by staging one of those car accidents that aren’t really accidents. Stalin did this too. (Probably his most famous victim was Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor.) Killed alongside Payá was his young colleague Harold Cepero.

Incidentally, Senator Ted Cruz has proposed renaming the street outside the new Cuban embassy in Washington after Payá. It’s an inspired idea. This is what we did in the Reagan ’80s, when we renamed the street outside the Soviet embassy after Sakharov.

(The Reagan ’80s were very different from the Obama ’10s. And from a Hillary-led Democratic party, and a Trump-led Republican party, you really don’t hear about human rights, freedom, and democracy. The accommodation of thugocracies is in style. Under a Trump administration, we might rename the street outside the Russian embassy after Putin.)

Cruz also wants the Chinese Communists to live with Liu Xiabo Plaza. Liu, as you know, is the Nobel peace laureate who is a prisoner of the CCP.

Rosa María Payá is carrying on the work of her father — at considerable risk to herself. She is one of the leading democracy campaigners in all of Latin America. (The president of the Latin American Network of Youth for Democracy, for example.) As I remarked to her, she’s a chip off the old block.

She is at the Oslo Freedom Forum — the annual human-rights conference in Norway — where I talked with her yesterday. For our podcast, our Q&A, go here.

We talked about her father, her work, President Obama, and so on. This is an extended and slightly meandering discussion – not a quick, crisp, showbizzy podcast — but I think it will repay you, as you will meet someone extraordinary. And someone who puts her neck on the line for values that are under attack all over.