It’s hard to say what the future might have held for Oswaldo Payá, a prominent Cuban dissident who headed the Christian Liberation Movement on the island, had he not perished in a car accident yesterday.

But what he left behind is no small thing: he managed to organize fellow Cubans, who organized more fellow Cubans and together they collected nearly 25,000 signatures seeking democratic reforms to the Cuban constitution. And while some criticized him for his Varela Project (so named for a famous Cuban priest and independence hero), which proposed changes to a constitution that critics refuse to legitimize, the movement he led is the only reformist one that I’m aware of to spread across the island and reach thousands of Cubans. Payá, who shunned U.S. aid insisted that Cuba’s transition would be undertaken by Cubans, not foreign governments. It was Paya’s Varela Project that reached the ears of an entire nation, thanks to President Carter’s nationally live-televised 2002 speech – in Spanish, no less – at the University of Havana.

Oswaldo Payá was a man dedicated to his faith and to his hopes for a more just and democratic society. Simply put, he made an impact in a way few other Cuban dissident activists have, and his passing leaves a void that won't be easily filled.