Give Me Liberty tells the inspiring story of Cuban human rights activist

David E. Hoffman’s Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá is a riveting, much-needed portrait of a fearless Cuban human rights activist who tried to reform Fidel Castro’s dictatorship and whose efforts ultimately cost him his life. Thanks to this excellent book, readers will learn the ugly truth about Cuba’s political realities and be inspired by one of the great unsung Catholic heroes of recent decades.

An unsentimental portrait of Castro

Probably no dictatorship has ever enjoyed such a favorable media image as Fidel Castro’s Cuba. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.” (Sartre was also an apologist for Chairman Mao, who killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and in 1977 signed a petition demanding the legalization of pedophilia in France.)

Major Hollywood productions like Michael Moore’s Sicko disseminate the balderdash that communist Cuba has better healthcare system than the United States, while well-known filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh and Walter Salles have made big budget productions romanticizing Che as the George Washington of Latin America. When Fidel Castro died in 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s official statement sounded like it was eulogizing Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa.

And it’s not just the Hollywood and media and political establishments: anybody who, like myself, has completed a liberal arts education in the United States has met plenty of undergraduates from the well-off suburbs with Che posters in their dorm rooms who profess that even if Castro may have occasionally committed a peccadillo (who hasn’t?), then he nonetheless deserves credit for liberating Cuba from Yankee imperialism.

About half of Give Me Liberty is not focused on Oswaldo Payá specifically but instead provides an overview of Cuban history, from the island’s nineteenth-century wars of independence from Spain to the present. Hoffman effectively debunks all the myths about the “progress” Castro has made, but also provides context as to why many Cubans supported the 1959 revolution in the first place.

While demonstrating that by the standards of mid-twentieth century Latin America pre-revolutionary Cuba was relatively prosperous, Hoffman notes that there was a major divide between the affluence of cities like Havana and the penury of rural areas, especially the poor-as-church mice Oriente province. Furthermore, the Cuban Revolution broke out in response to the corrupt, violent dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Indeed, the revolution was an expression of the Cuban masses’ pent-up anger at their nation’s political quagmire. Furthermore, as Hoffman points out, during the revolution the Castro brothers explicitly denied being communists. Fidel, in fact, promised that the revolutionary government would be temporary and that free elections would be held a year after deposing Batista (a promise that, sixty-four years later, has yet to be implemented).

Yet, as Hoffman writes, post-revolutionary Cuba’s human rights record was even worse than under Batista. Whereas the Batista-era constitution had banned capital punishment, Castro’s junta immediately undertook a Stalin-style campaign of brutally shooting Batista supporters without trial. Quickly, Cuban prisons became populated with thousands of political prisoners, which has persisted until the present. From 1965 to 1968, thousands of Cubans were compelled to work under slave conditions in the UMAP concentration camps.

Whereas Che imagery is ubiquitous in the performances of rockers including Carlos Santana and Rage Against the Machine, Cubans could be arrested for listening to the Beatles or Stones. And while many of Castro and Che’s North American and European admirers celebrate Pride Month twelve months a year, Cuba’s dictatorship brutally persecuted homosexuals.

A dissident rooted in faith

Although much of Hoffman’s book is an overview of Cuba’s political history rather than Payá’s life specifically, it is nevertheless engrossing and provides context that is crucial especially considering all the myths readers commonly hear about the island.

Oswaldo Payá was born into a devoutly Catholic family and was an active member of the El Salvador del Mundo parish in Havana. Although two in five of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America, Cuba is one of the Western Hemisphere’s least religious nations. While the Church had provided many of Cuba’s finest schools (Castro himself was educated by the Jesuits), the Cubans were not particularly pious before 1959, and the Castro regime’s persecution of religion further eroded their faith. According to statistics cited by Hoffman, less than 1 percent of Cubans are regular Mass-goers, while the number of Cuban believers for every priest mushroomed from 8,848 before the revolution to 45,248 in 1980. Hoffman calls practicing Cuban Catholics “a small, committed band of faithful, so tiny that everyone knew almost everyone else from parish to parish.”

As a young man, Payá performed slave labor cutting sugarcane at an UMAP. The more he witnessed the cruelty of the Castro regime and the more steeped he became in the works of Catholic social teaching, he increasingly began to realize that human rights are not given by the state, but by God.

At a very superficial level, Oswaldo Payá’s dissident activity doesn’t sound terribly exciting. At his parish, he edited a newsletter, Pueblo de Dios (“The People of God”), which documented human rights abuses. Meanwhile, inspired by a provision of the 1976 Cuban constitution that necessitates a referendum when 11,000 signatures are obtained, Payá started the Varela Project, named after the Cuban priest and nineteenth-century freedom fighter Félix Varela. The Varela Project proposed a referendum on free expression, enterprise, and assembly as well as political pluralism in Cuba.

The task of collecting 11,000 signatures (not a huge number in a nation of eleven million) was fraught with danger, and Payá knew this well: dissidents were constantly jailed in Cuba, while state security, whose leader Jacinto Valdés-Dapena was but a handful of non-Germans trained by the notorious East German Stasi (whose insidious methods of manipulation and psychological torture are brilliantly illustrated in the film The Lives of Others), had eyes and ears everywhere. Meanwhile, Payá lacked the support of the Miami-based Cuban exile community, which saw his pragmatic attempts at reforming the Cuban regime from the inside as not radical enough.

Despite these difficulties, Payá courageously chose to stay in Cuba, although he had numerous opportunities to flee to freedom, such as during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when Castro let any Cuban who wanted to leave for the United States. Ultimately, despite obstacles such as Cuban state security’s attempt to nullify the Varela Project’s efforts by providing it with phony signatures, Payá submitted the required number to the National Assembly in 2002 (spoiler: Castro never agreed to a referendum).

In 2012, the dictatorship got its revenge and staged a car accident that claimed Payá’s life. Hoffman writes that the state was almost certainly responsible for his death; in 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights confirmed this accusation.

A brave pope and a timid bishop

One of the most fascinating aspects of Give Me Liberty is the description of the divergent responses of the institutional Church to the Castro dictatorship. Hoffman offers a somewhat negative assessment of Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the Archbishop of Havana from 1981 to 2016. He mentions that although the prelate did send several letters of protest to Fidel Castro, he nonetheless sought a kind of détente with the regime. In fact, he at one point demanded that Payá stop publishing Pueblo de Dios, which the dissident did out of deference to the Church.

Nevertheless, one of the book’s heroes is Pope St. John Paul II. Since his visit to his native Poland in 1979, which historians unanimously list as one of the main causes for the collapse of communist hegemony in Eastern Europe a decade later, the pope had been an inspiration to Payá, as had Poland’s Solidarity movement. In the 1980s, Oswaldo Payá sported a walrus mustache as a nod to Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

Pope St. John Paul II’s 1998 visit to Cuba galvanized the island’s dissidents. During his speeches, the pope appealed to Castro to amnesty political prisoners, while he told the Cubans that they “must be the protagonists of [their] own personal and national history.” Later in his writings, Payá quoted the pope and insisted that his countrymen become protagonists of their history rather than passively conform to the dictatorship.

There are a couple flaws in Give Me Liberty. Hoffman writes, for instance, that the military junta in El Salvador “murdered hundreds of men, women, and children,” but the actual number of victims was much greater, closer to seventy thousand. A couple times, Hoffman mentions in passing liberation theology, an odd marriage of Marxism and Catholicism popular in much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, describing it as the Church’s defense of the poor. In fact, liberation theology’s biggest proponents often supported murderous regimes, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or communist Cuba (Fidel Castro, in fact, was a major advocate of the movement).

Yet Give Me Liberty is a highly readable account of the horrors of one of the world’s longest-ruling dictatorships and a tribute to the long-oppressed Cuban people who risk their lives by crossing a hundred miles of shark-infested, stormy waters to the safety of Florida in the tens of thousands. Oswaldo Payá is an inspiring example not only to Catholics living under dictatorships, but even to those of us in the wealthy, democratic, increasingly Godless West.

Whereas no equivalence can be drawn between the oppression of a communist dictatorship and the comfortable decadence of the secularized Western world, Payá’s example proves that even a small Catholic community can be enough to make a difference and stand up for what is just and true.

Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba
By David E. Hoffman
Simon & Schuster, 2022
Hardcover, 544 pages