Texas Senator Ted Cruz breathed new life into his campaign to honor a slain Cuban political activist by renaming the street in front of the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C.
Oswaldo Payá is believed to have been killed by the Cuban government in a collision with a state-owned vehicle in 2012, as an investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Payá had opposed the single-party communist control over Cuba and founded the Christian Liberation Movement to support the democratization of the island nation.
Cruz had spearheaded the bipartisan initiative to change the name of the D.C. street in front of the Cuban embassy to Oswaldo Payá Way in 2021. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Rick Scott (R-FL), passed Senate but was stalled in the House.
This year, the Senate once again passed the bill. Cruz is reportedly optimistic that the Republican-led House will pass it this time around, according to the DMN.
Similarly symbolic initiatives to keep the memory of democratic activists alive have been previously taken in the nation’s capital.
For instance, during the Cold War, the street in front of the Soviet embassy was named Sakharov Plaza in honor of the nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, a human rights advocate.
Moreover, in 2018, the D.C. City Council renamed the street in front of the Russian embassy Boris Nemtsov Plaza in memory of the allegedly assassinated opposition leader and Kremlin critic. Other capitals followed suit in the subsequent years, including Vilnius, Kyiv, and Prague.
For Cruz, the statement he aims to make to the Cuban government is more personal due to his family’s connection to the island nation. The senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, reportedly fought with Fidel Castro to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista before later turning away from communism.
“Rosa Maria Payá and I have fought for years to honor her father’s memory properly, and I look forward to immortalizing his legacy for all the world to see. … I believe that through the tireless fight of Cuban dissidents like Oswaldo Payá, the world will someday see a Cuba Libre,” said Sen. Cruz in a press release.
