MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

When Castro is gone: “peace and reconciliation”

Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya says he fears the Castro regime will begin killing opponents if it feels threatened, though he also detects in the events surrounding Fidel Castro's illness signs of impending rapid change in Cuba.

"More than Fidel's death, it is the ineffectiveness of the Castro system that will bring the regime down" Paya said in an interview published Monday by the left-leaning French daily Liberation.

Paya argues that the announcement of Castro's illness "has created great expectations. For the first time Cubans see a concrete possibility of change". A change that "will happen quickly and is inevitable, since people can no longer bear the idea of living another year" in the paralysis situation that has been brought on by Castro's absence.

People "will in turn start protesting. That will be a critical moment and the end may be fatal and bloody. I hope it's no more than a tense, gradual" change, Paya said, adding that all members of the opposition want a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.

Last July 31 Cuba's state television announced that the octogenarian leader was provisionally handing over power to his younger brother and designated successor Raul Castro, the island's long-time defense chief, for the duration of Fidel's recovery from intestinal surgery.

Asked if he feels particularly threatened, the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement said that "if the regime wavers, henchmen have received the order to physically eliminate the opposition" adding that police harassment has significantly increased to the point of having found microphones under his bed.

As to the future and the pos-Castro era, Paya who in 2002 received the European Parliament Sakharov Prize for human rights activism, was uncompromising, "under no circumstances do we want foreign intervention, not even a constitution written by other governments or taken from another country". He also defended a "national reconciliation and forgiveness" process.

Paya also talked about the millions of exiled Cubans "who are an integral part of the Cuban nation. They have the right to return with all citizenship rights, but I do not believe they can reclaim their former homes because that would mean evicting families that have been living there for decades".

He insisted that the Cuban regime's achievements in health and education, "must be preserved", but recalled that they have been used to justify depriving people of all their political and economic rights, and added that "we cannot forget the thousands of people who have faced firing squads and the millions of others who have gone into exile since 1959" when Castro took power.

Paya is best known for the Varela Project, which gathered some 25,000 signatures from Cubans calling on their country's parliament to hold a referendum on measures to democratize the island.