New Pope, Leo XIV, met Cuban opponent Harold Cepero

The Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) confirmed on its social networks that a photograph that circulated in the last hours of the priest Robert Francis Prevost, in Havana, shows today Pope Leo XIV next to the Cuban opponent Harold Cepero Escalante.

The young layman was 32 when he lost his life next to the Sájarov Award, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, on July 22, 2012, on a Bayamo road, after the car in which the Cuban opponents and European activists Aron Modig and Angel Carromero were in the back of the Cuban Political Police that pursued them.

The MCL, founded by Payá in 1988, has referred to Cepero Escalante as a «martyr of faith» and said that the photograph that shows it with the new Pontiff was facilitated by the also activist Manuel Robles Villamarín.

In 2023, the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) joined other organizations that have recognized that the death of both was caused by state agents, as part of state persecution and repression «with the aim of hindering or paralyzing the work of defense and promotion of human rights.”

Cepero Escalante was expelled in 2002 from the University of Camagüey for supporting the “Varela Project”, an initiative that came to collect more than 11 thousand signatures in support of a referendum.

He then studied philosophy and theology at the San Agustín seminars, in the city of Camagüey, and San Carlos and San Ambrosio, of Havana, but departed from the priestly vocation to devote himself to peaceful political activism.

Leo XIV visited Cuba in 2008 and 2011 being general general of the order of San Agustín. On these trips he visited Havana, Ciego de Ávila, Las Tunas and Holguín.