Regis Iglesias / MCL spokesman
Carlos Payá / MCL representative in Spain
Three years have already passed since that fateful day, 22 July 2012, when we were advised that something had happened to friends as they were driving by car to the town of Granma. Two young men, Angel Carromero, leader of the New Generations of the Spanish Partido Popular in Madrid and Aron Modig, of the Swedish Christian Democratic Party had been travelling in Cuba as a gesture of solidarity for the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL in Spanish). An SMS message to their friends that afternoon said that “a vehicle had forced them off the road”.
Without knowing that Oswaldo and Harold were accompanying them,we phoned the island and the news was confirmed, Oswaldo and Harold had joined our friends and now they were dead. Carromero and Modig remained in hospital, under a strong police guard.
The initial massage, sent from Modig’s phone to Sweden and from there to Madrid, related the cause of the incident, “they were following us and the car hit us and forced us off the road”. We were to learn further details later. Immediately the regime began to mobilise all its resources and means to confuse and misinform, intending to make public opinion believe that it had been an “accident”. Weeks later and while the two young people, Carromero and Modig, remained in confinement, the regime presented televised recordings of them confirming the official version. Modig was returned to his home country and shown no desire to ever discuss the subject any further; he remembers nothing, he says. Carromero was to remain there for several more months, subject to torture and threats to ensure that he would maintain his televised declaration of the event, otherwise he would not return to Spain alive. Once back in Madrid. he confirmed what he had informed his friend that first day, in those tragic moments, they had been the victims of an attack.
“Cuba will change when the Cubans are able to freely decide on their present and on their future”
Since then, we have been calling for an independent investigation to clarify what happened but there has been no response. More than one hundred international figures, among them Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Lech Walesa, Mario Vargas Llosa and José María Aznares, have demanded the real facts of the incident, since the version by the Cuban regime, so plagued with contradictions and unanswered questions is unsustainable.
Nothing has changed in the island since the crime took place in 2012, even worse, with the consent of the United States and the European Union, they have gone on perpetrating the fraudulent changes, as described by Oswaldo, and continued the military oligarchy that has controlled the country since 1959, metamorphosed nowadays into the new entrepreneurial capitalism with which the foreign investors deal as, little by little, they inject foreign exchange into the regime, replacing the exterior parasitical dependence that was first defrayed by the Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Venezuelans and now, newly, after a half an absence of half a century, the Americans.
Oswaldo’s legacy lives still. Cuba will change when the Cubans can freely decide on their present and on their future, when the Cubans can freely express their popular sovereignty, which continues to be absent and is where the Christian Liberation Movement focusses its work.
