Totalitarian Cuba just the way the left likes it

Cuba dissidents arrested after Oswaldo Paya's funeral

Cuban police have arrested at least seven dissidents after the funeral of prominent activist Oswaldo Paya, who died in a car crash on Sunday.

Those detained include leading dissident Guillermo Farinas.

At a service for Mr Paya in Havana on Monday his son told the BBC that he believed his father's car was forced off the road.

The official account is that the driver lost control and hit a tree as it drove near the eastern city of Bayano.

Dissidents were picked up for questioning by plain-clothes police who had been deployed outside the church where the mass was held.

Guillermo Farinas is known for staging hunger strikes that drew attention to the plight of political prisoners in Cuba. In 2010 he was awarded the Sakharov Prize - the European Union's human rights award - which had gone to Mr Paya in 2002.

Reports say he was arrested along with other activists as they emerged from the church funeral service to go to the cemetery shouting slogans against the government.

Some of Cuba's most prominent human rights campaigners have vowed to continue fighting for democracy on the Communist island, despite the death of Mr Paya.

'Death threats'

A fellow activist, 31-year-old Harold Cepero, was also killed in the accident, in eastern Granma province.

Two other people - one Swede and one Spaniard - were injured but have now left hospital.

Mr Paya's son, also called Oswaldo, alleges that the two Europeans said they had been forced off the road by a truck that rammed their car repeatedly.

However, they not yet made any public statement and the Swedish embassy said it could not comment on the reports.

Cuba's roads, even the motorways, are notoriously ill-kept and dangerous.

"My father has had multiple death threats," Mr Paya's son said. "And they increased after the Varela Project. That was the strongest pressure the government had faced in 50 years."

Mr Paya, 60, is best-known as the founder of the project - a campaign begun in 1998 to gather signatures in support of a referendum on laws guaranteeing civil rights.

He had become a critic of the Communist government as a teenager, and in 2002 he won the Sakharov Prize for his work with the project.

In May 2002, he presented Cuba's National Assembly with a petition of more than 10,000 signatures calling for an end to four decades of one-party rule.

He has since repeatedly delivered petitions to the body, including one in 2007 calling for an amnesty for non-violent political prisoners.

The Cuban government described him as an agent of the United States who was working to undermine the country's revolution.

But he did not keep close links with the anti-Castro opposition in the US, which has criticised him for being too moderate.