Cuba activist Oswaldo Paya, who has spent decades speaking against the communist government of Fidel and Raul Castro and became one of the strongest voices of dissent against the government of his half-century, died Sunday in a car crash in Cuba had 60.
Paya and a man described by the Cuban press as a fellow activist, Harold Cepero Escalante died in a traffic accident in The Seagull, just outside the eastern city of Bayamo, the Cuban authorities said. A Spaniard and a Swede in the car were injured.
Cuba's International Press Centre told the Associated Press reported that witnesses said the driver of the vehicle lost control and struck a tree.
Paya, who draw strength from his Roman Catholic roots, he pressed for the change in his homeland, he again expressed his opposition, after Fidel Castro resigned due to illness in the first months of 2008, calling for the approval of the presidency a disappointment to his younger brother Raul.
Paya has become an activist in late 1980 when he founded the NGO Christian Liberation Movement, which emphasizes the peaceful civic action.
He gained international fame as a top organizer of the Varela Project, a unit of collecting signatures on the authorities to request a referendum on laws guaranteeing civil rights such as freedom of speech and assembly.
Shortly before President Carter visited Cuba in 2002, Paya delivered 11,020 signatures to the parliament of the island in search of this initiative.
He then delivered a second batch of petitions with over 14,000 signatures to the National Assembly, the parliament of Cuba poses a renewed challenge to the socialist island.
The Varela Project was seen as the largest non-violent campaign to change the system greater stability of Castro after the Cuban revolution of 1959.
The government annulled the first set of firms and launched his own successful petition drive to establish the island as a socialist system "irrevocable" in the Cuban Constitution.
Paya has continued its efforts, saying it was important to mobilize human rights in Cuba to ask the government for approval of the project.
However, his influence declined in recent years, particularly its younger activists in the international headlines.
Paya and other former opposition figures are described disparagingly leaked, confidential diplomatic cables Americans as old, divided by petty rivalries and not in contact with young people on the island.
Oswaldo José Paya Sardiñas was born February 29, 1952, the fifth of seven children of a Catholic family.
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