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July 28th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Cuban authorities have released without charge most of the dissidents arrested after the funeral of political activist Oswaldo Paya, activists said.
“I was arrested for about nine hours at the Tarara police school (in eastern Havana) with about 20 other dissidents. Then, they took me home by car,” rights activist Guillermo Farinas told AFP.
Farinas, the 2010 winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, was among dozens of dissidents arrested Tuesday after they emerged from Paya’s funeral shouting anti-government slogans.
Most of the other arrested dissidents also were freed under similar conditions, according to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), a dissident information clearinghouse.
Speaking to AFP from his home in the central city of Santa Clara, Farinas, known for hunger strikes against the Americas’ only one-party Communist regime, said he was released “without charge,” as were the other dissidents arrested with him in Tarara.
During his arrest, Farinas said he was struck in the face and forced onto a bus that took him and others to the police barracks.
“I asked (police interrogators) what law in Cuba kept me from walking next to a hearse but they could not answer,” he said.
CCDHRN president Elizardo Sanchez said “most” of those arrested were freed late Tuesday.
Authorities say Paya, 60, died on Sunday along with another dissident, Harold Cepero Escalante, when their rental car went off the road and struck a tree in southeastern Cuba.
Paya, an engineer and fervent Roman Catholic, founded the Christian Liberation Movement, a group pressing for political change in Cuba.
He won international attention in 2002 when, on the eve of a visit by former US president Jimmy Carter, he presented Cuba’s legislature with more than 11,000 signatures in support of an initiative calling for change on the communist island.
Cuba was then still run by Fidel Castro, and Paya’s move was a bold, landmark first confrontation between a citizen seeking wholesale change — economic and democratic — from within the existing political system.
Paya won the Sakharov prize for human rights later that same year.
Yet his defiance of the Communist system did not bear fruit at home.
When Carter mentioned Paya’s project in an uncensored speech on Cuban state television, most Cubans, in a country with only official media, had never heard of it. The Cuban legislature ultimately rejected the initiative.
Paya’s daughter, 23-year-old Rosa Maria Paya, sharply questioned the official Cuban account of her father’s death in an impassioned statement delivered at the funeral before an audience that included leaders of Cuba’s Roman Catholic church.
Rosa Maria said her skepticism of the official version was based on “the repeated threats against the life of my father and our family.”
Cuba “should carry out a full and transparent investigation, because it should be determined what exactly happened,” a US State Department spokesman, Mike Hammer, said in Spanish in response to questions on Twitter.
The United States earlier condemned the arrest of dissidents at Paya’s funeral as “a stark demonstration of the climate of repression in Cuba.”
“We call on the Cuban government to respect internationally recognized fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, rather than arresting their citizens for peacefully exercising these universal rights that are protected and promoted by governments throughout the world,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement.
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