Oswaldo PayA SardiNas, a prominent Cuban Catholic activist and political dissident, was this week refused an exit visa by the Cuban Government, after being invited by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office to travel to London. Lord Triesman, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Latin America, has written to the Cuban ambassador expressing his disappointment; the Cuban embassy in London was not returning calls this week.

Pay?, 53, a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was due to speak at Chatham House and at a conference at Lancaster House. He has been an irritant to Fidel Castro?s Government for many years. At school he refused to join Communist youth organisations, and was sent to a forced labour camp at the age of 17. He was excluded from the University of Havana for his outspoken views on religion and politics, and had great difficulty finding work. He nevertheless refused to join the hundreds of thousands of dissidents, including members of his family, who had gone into exile in southern Florida.

In 1987, Pay? founded the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), as a non-violent pressure group for human rights and political freedom, and he became a tireless campaigner for a dialogue on the country?s political future. In 1997 he drafted the Varela Project, a programme for transforming Cuba into a free, democratic society through four amendments to the constitution, guaranteeing freedom of expression, association, movement and political beliefs. In May 2002, he delivered more than 11,000 signatures to the National Assembly, arguing that, under Cuban law, this automatically made the project a draft bill, which the assembly was obliged to debate and vote on. It never happened.

The Cuban Government has frequently refused Pay? permission to travel abroad, to receive awards or address meetings. On the one occasion it relented, he travelled to Strasbourg in December 2002 to receive the European Parliament?s Andrei Sakharov prize for his defence of freedom of thought and human rights. Although the Castro Government regards Pay? as a mercenary in the pay of Washington, it has been careful not to harm him. When, in 2003, 75 prominent dissidents were rounded up and imprisoned for up to 28 years, he was not among them. Pay?, who is a critic of the American embargo on Cuba, insists that he is politically independent. ?I?m not married to the idea of capitalism or of socialism,? he said on one occasion. ?I believe in the worth of the individual, in the liberation of the person from within.?
Colin Harding