[The European Conservative] Cuban Dissident

A Pulitzer-prize winner chronicles Oswaldo Payá’s lifelong struggle to bring democracy to Cuba.

Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba. By David E. Hoffman. Simon & Schuster; 519 pages; $29.99.

Ten years since he was murdered in a provoked car wreck still masqueraded as accidental, the life of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (1952–2012) appears to readers of David Hoffman’s new biography like a 60-year-long race against Fidel Castro. What the two men were racing toward came into sharper focus upon Fidel’s natural death in 2016. By removing every obstacle in his path, the socialist strongman lived to perpetuate into the 21st century the tyranny dressed up as egalitarian utopia he had launched in a revolution the year before Payá’s birth. By envisioning, instead, a Cuba where the people freely ruled themselves, the Christian dissident had become Fidel’s main such obstacle by the early 2010s. And so it came to pass, that on a deserted highway near Bayamo, in Cuba’s east, in the sweltering mid-July heat in 2012, the world’s oldest dictatorship got a new lease on life. Despite Oswaldo’s steely resolve to outlive his regime, Fidel won that day the race to Cuba’s future.

Continue reading the entire book review at The European Conservative here.