Rosa María Payá has joined the Organization of American States’ human rights commission, despite backing US sanctions on Cuba, cozying up to far-right leaders, and lacking basic knowledge of international law.
Cuban American activist Rosa María Payá was voted into the Organization of American States (OAS)’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on Friday despite concerns from an independent panel of her “conflicts of interest” and lack of knowledge about human rights law. The Trump administration has lobbied hard for the organization to select Payá, with whom it has close ties.
Payá runs Cuba Decide, which is backed by groups bankrolled by the US government. She has also been a vocal supporter of Washington’s sanctions against Cuba, which have contributed to shortages in food, medicine, and electricity on the island.
“Payá’s long record of support for the crushing embargo against Cuba runs directly counter to the commission’s purported mission of protecting human rights,” said Michael Galant, an analyst at the DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which submitted a report on Payá to the American University Washington College of Law panel that evaluated her.
The panel noted that Payá “demonstrated limited substantive knowledge of the norms, jurisprudence, or doctrine of international human rights law.” It also expressed concern about her membership in various civil society organizations.
Payá has also leveled unfounded accusations against left-leaning governments in the region, such as calling Colombian vice president Francia Márquez a supporter of terrorism. Márquez has criticized sanctions on Cuba as well as the US government’s erroneous designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Payá has maintained warm relations with right-wing leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. In 2020, Payá praised then de facto Bolivian president Jeanine Áñez (now in prison for leading a coup) weeks after her government committed massacres that were condemned by the IACHR.
OAS States Buckle Under US Pressure
Payá was admitted into the IACHR in the first round of voting by twenty of the thirty-two OAS states that voted.
“A fervent advocate of human rights violations has now become one of the seven ‘custodians’ of human rights in the region,” said Galant. “Her election to the commission is a stain on the institution, a reminder of the US’s outsize and pernicious influence at the OAS.”
The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement on Friday accusing the White House of “blackmail” by threatening to cut aid budgets in the region if member states did not vote for Payá.
Payá’s selection was expected given Washington’s history of arm-twisting OAS member states to do their bidding.
Before the OAS General Assembly in Antigua and Barbuda, the State Department announced that Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau would “meet with foreign counterparts and heads of delegation to advocate for the election” of Payá.
On Thursday, the State Department put out a statement praising Payá and “urging” member states to support her candidacy.
After the OAS vote, Payá thanked Secretary of State Marco Rubio for paving the way for her selection to the commission through “bold leadership” and an “unwavering defense of freedom in our hemisphere.”
Trump Goes After Cuban Medical Teams
Payá’s selection to the human rights commission comes at a time when the Trump administration is ramping up its campaign to pressure other countries into cutting ties with Cuba’s medical missions. This campaign already appears to be impacting the IACHR, which recently sent an unprecedented request to member states requesting they submit information within thirty days about Cuba’s medical cooperation in their countries.
“The IACHR may be acting as an enforcer for the United States, a kind of policing arm advancing Washington’s agenda of tightening the sixty-year-old blockade to try to overthrow the Cuban government,” said Francesca Emanuele, a senior international policy associate at CEPR whose research is focused on the OAS. “The timing is highly suspicious, especially given the context, which puts at risk public officials who are working to expand access to health care in their countries.”
The letter was sent on May 20 by Javier Palummo Lantes, the IACHR’s special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights.
In the letter, Palummo submits a laundry list of requests for information about past and present Cuban medical missions, including details of the contracts, documentation of legal complaints, and information about medical personnel who have abandoned the missions.
“To issue such a sweeping request to all countries and announce that the information will be made public seems either malicious, externally driven, or dangerously naive,” said Emanuele.
The Trump administration has ratcheted up a long-running campaign to pressure Global South countries into cutting ties with Cuban health professionals under the guise of concern for human rights, claiming Cuban doctors are victims of “forced labor.”
Extensive research and interviews with the doctors themselves tell a different story. While available information indicates the Cuban state takes the lion’s share of payments for the missions in most cases, the Cuban doctors and nurses volunteer for missions abroad and are paid many times more than their salaries back on the island.
The Cuban medical teams most often are posted in urban neighborhoods and remote rural areas home to the poorest of the poor. The teams have also been dispatched in response to international health emergencies such as Ebola and COVID-19, and natural disasters including earthquakes in Pakistan and Haiti.
US Leans on the Caribbean
The Trump administration’s propaganda and diplomatic arm-twisting aimed at Cuban medical cooperation, coupled with harsher sanctions, is a part of its “maximum pressure” strategy to bring about regime change via economic strangulation.
The Cuban people bear the brunt of these policies, but government officials in other countries are now feeling the pinch.
In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa restrictions for foreign government officials — and their families — who have welcomed the Cuban medical teams. And earlier this month, Rubio announced that unnamed Central American officials had had their visas restricted.
The threats to restrict visas initially sparked outrage across the Caribbean, with several heads of government openly defying the United States.
But some governments appear to be caving.
The Bahamas has announced it would cancel contracts with Cuban doctors after its talks with Washington.
The Bahamas health and wellness minister, Michael Darville, said his government would try to “enter into direct employment contracts” with the Cuban health personnel in the country but indicated that such a new arrangement would need approval from the Trump administration.
“The services they provide in the country are needed, and so the [Bahamas] Ministry of Foreign Affairs is presently in discussions with their counterparts in the United States,” said Darville.
Meanwhile, Guyana is reconsidering its agreement with Cuba in response to US demands.
“We are working to ensure that the people who come here from Cuba meet the definition because of what the US secretary of state mentioned, that the conditions of work here don’t run afoul of the requirements set by the United States of America,” said Guyana’s vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo, at a news conference.
A Tool of US Policy
The OAS has long served as a tool of US foreign policy, supporting US-backed dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as well as armed interventions, including the 1954 coup that toppled Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s democratically elected president. At the insistence of the United States, Cuba was suspended from the OAS three years after its 1959 revolution.
Washington lost some control over the organization during the Pink Tide of the 2000s, when South American presidents like Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Kirchners pushed back against US hegemony in the region.
But in 2015, the OAS took a sharp turn to the right under the leadership of Luis Almagro, who wielded the organization to back far-right politicians worldwide, from Spain’s Vox Party to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, and to vocally support Israel even as it committed genocide in Gaza. During Trump’s first term, Almagro said a US military intervention in Venezuela should not be ruled out, a position that contradicted the OAS Charter’s principles of nonintervention and respect for national sovereignty.
Almagro, who counted on strong support from the Trump administration and Cuban American hard-liners like Rubio, also opened the OAS’s doors to prominent Cuban opposition figures, including Payá.
Almagro stepped down three weeks ago and was replaced by Albert Ramdin, a Surinamese diplomat who was voted in with strong support from Caribbean nations.
Even if Ramdin wants to change the course of the organization, his options may be limited given that its budget is largely subsidized by the US government. The United States hosts the OAS headquarters and is its largest financial contributor at more than $60 million in 2024.
Washington may have even more leverage as the Trump administration proposed slashing its contributions to the organization by 75 percent in its congressional budget request.
The budget request includes $2.9 billion for a new America First Opportunity Fund (A1OF), which the State Department could spend at its discretion to “make America safer, stronger and more prosperous.” The OAS was not mentioned as a potential beneficiary of this funding, but contributions to the United Nations budget were given as an example of how some of these funds may be used.
This post was originally published on Jacobin.