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 Michel Mirabal and Payá’s wake

According to Al2’s account, in those July 2012 days news of Payá’s farewell spread by word of mouth in Havana, not through the official news, and the mood around the wake “was heated.” That was when, he says, Mirabal came up with a party and took a lot of people with him. Al2 admits he does not remember exactly when or where it took place. 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 wake, others were partying.

Al2 knows Michel Mirabal personally. According to the rapper, 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 more than 40 activists were detained around the funeral, and human rights defender Elizardo Sánchez told the organization that as many as 200 police and State Security agents had been 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.

Michel Mirabal blamed the “blockade” after the 11J protests

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 the excerpt of that interview published by Cubanos por el Mundo, 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.

Michel Mirabal between Havana galleries and Washington

Mirabal continues to exhibit on the island with coverage from official media. In November 2025 the state agency Prensa Latina reported on his exhibition “Tú no me conoces” at the Luz y Oficio center in Old Havana, which marked his return to Cuban galleries after 15 years.

He has also been present on the American side of the relationship: in August 2015 he was among the guests invited by then-Secretary of State John Kerry to the reception that followed the reopening of the US Embassy in Havana. That record is the backdrop to Al2’s account: in the rapper’s version, the artist who paints the Cuban flag and travels to the United States was throwing a party when it was time to bid farewell to Payá.

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