Rosa María Payá, a Cuban activist and commissioner of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), endorsed this Monday the 100-page report published by the Department of State titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” which documents nearly seven decades of espionage, ideological subversion, and support for terrorism by the Cuban regime.
Through his account on X, Payá reacted to the document with a strong statement: "The State Department has just published what the Cuban people have known for 67 years: the regime is not just a local tyranny. It is proven that the regime is a systematic subversion operation against democracy, both inside and outside of Cuba. Thank you to Secretary Rubio for exposing this truth to the world."
The weight of those words is not coincidental: Payá is a direct victim of the Cuban state terrorism.
His father, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, founder of the Christian Liberation Movement and one of the most significant opposition leaders in recent Cuban history, died on July 22, 2012, along with activist Harold Cepero in a suspicious car accident near Bayamo.
The official version of the regime attributed the deaths to the negligence of the driver, the Spaniard Ángel Carromero, who was sentenced to four years in prison by Cuban courts, but upon his release in Spain claimed he had been forced to falsely confess.
In June 2023, the IACHR —an organization that Payá has been a part of since January 2026— concluded that there is "serious and sufficient evidence" that Cuban state agents were directly involved in the deaths of Payá and Cepero.
Two years later, on July 22, 2025, the State Department became more explicit: «The Cuban regime killed pro-democracy leaders Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero».
The report published this Monday, prepared under the leadership of Marco Rubio within the framework of the maximum pressure policy of the Trump administration, states that the confrontation between the Cuban regime and the United States "was not, in essence, a dispute over economic policy, sovereignty, or even the ownership of a particular territory," but rather "a revolution against Western civilization itself."
The document links the regime to movements such as the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Puerto Rican FALN, as well as organizations like Code Pink and the People's Forum.
The publication comes just two days before the 14th anniversary of Oswaldo Payá's death and is part of a broader diplomatic offensive: on July 15, Rubio convened a ministerial meeting with 66 countries to combat extreme left transnational terrorism.
Since January 2026, the U.S. has imposed over 240 sanctions against the Cuban regime as part of the same strategy. This Tuesday, Miguel Díaz-Canel responded to the report by calling Rubio «corrupt» and denying all allegations.
Rosa María Payá, who was elected commissioner of the IACHR on June 27, 2025, with 20 votes at the 55th General Assembly of the OAS —becoming the first Cuban to hold that position— has spent years denouncing to international bodies the state crime that took her father's life.
His support for the State Department's report comes from the perspective of someone who knows firsthand what the document describes: a regime that not only represses its own people but also exports that repression beyond its borders.
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