Rapper Al2 El Aldeano Accuses Painter Michel Mirabal of Throwing a Party to Thin Out Oswaldo Payá’s Wake

Rapper Al2 El Aldeano accuses painter Michel Mirabal of having thrown a party to keep people away from the wake of Oswaldo Payá, the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement who died in July 2012 in a crash his family always denounced as a killing, and for which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held the Cuban state responsible. Aldo Rodríguez made the accusation in a conversation with Alexander Otaola.

What Al2 says about Mirabal and Payá’s wake

According to Al2’s account, in those July 2012 days Payá’s farewell was being organized by word of mouth in Havana and the mood “was heated.” That was when, he says, Mirabal put together a party and took a lot of people with him. The rapper reads it today as a maneuver to keep those young people from going to bid farewell to the dissident: while some tried to reach the church, others were partying.

Al2 knows the painter well. It was Mirabal who first brought Los Aldeanos to Miami. The rapper also recalled that Mirabal asked him to change the lyrics of a song about the Cuban flag because they were “too strong,” and that on that first trip to the United States he advised them not to say too much to the press. This is Al2’s version. Cubanos por el Mundo did not find a public response from Mirabal to the accusation and will publish one if it arrives.

A wake under surveillance, with detainees

Payá died on July 22, 2012, near Bayamo, together with young activist Harold Cepero, when the car they were traveling in ran off the road. The government called it an accident. The survivors and the opposition leader’s family maintained from the first day that another vehicle rammed them.

His wake and funeral, at the El Salvador del Mundo church in El Cerro, did not take place in peace. Amnesty International reported that around 40 people were detained during the farewell, with up to 200 police and State Security agents deployed. That is the context in which Al2 places the party. Eleven years later, in June 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded that the Cuban state was responsible for the deaths of Payá and Cepero.

The same Mirabal who blamed the “blockade” for 11J

It is not the first time Michel Mirabal’s public positions have drawn criticism in exile. In an interview recorded days after the July 11, 2021 protests, he blamed the demonstrations on “so much time of scarcity” caused by “a blockade we have had for many years,” called flipping a patrol car “vandalism,” and said that in the face of a foreign intervention he would go out to fight “with whatever he had.” In that interview he did not mention the “combat order” issued by Miguel Díaz-Canel that same July 11, nor the mass arrests and trials that followed against hundreds of protesters.

Mirabal and official institutions

Mirabal has kept a conflict-free relationship with the island’s institutions. In November 2025 the state agency Prensa Latina reviewed his exhibition “Tú no me conoces” in Havana, with which he returned to Cuban galleries after 15 years. At the same time, he has known how to move in Washington: in August 2015 he was one of the guests of then-Secretary of State John Kerry at the reception following the reopening of the US Embassy in Havana. For critics like Al2, his testimony closes the circle: the artist who paints the flag, travels to the United States and, when it was time to bid farewell to Payá, was somewhere else.

Read this story in Spanish: Al2 El Aldeano acusa a Michel Mirabal de montar una fiesta para restarle gente al velorio de Oswaldo Payá.