Photo: JORGE SERRATOS/RCC/AGENCY EL UNIVERSAL/PICTURE ALLIANCE/ZUMAPRESS.COM / Deutsche Welle
The Cuban dissident collective Ladies in White denounced this Monday (11.05.2022) the arrest of several of its members, including its leader, Berta Soler. Her husband, the opponent Ángel Moya, reported on social networks the arrest of both on Sunday for some 16 hours.
This is the sixteenth consecutive weekend in which members of the Ladies in White are the object of repressive actions by the Cuban security forces, according to his own testimony.
Neither the Ministry of the Interior nor the official Cuban media have reported on these events.
Moya recounted on Facebook that he and Soler were arrested Sunday at noon and released separately near 5 a.m. Monday (local time). Both were fined.
Repression in Cuba against the Ladies in White for the sixteenth consecutive Sunday
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Members of the Ladies in White have been arrested every weekend since, last January, they decided to go out again to march on Sundays, after a break due to the pandemic, this time in favor of those detained in the protests of the 11J.
The movement arose in 2003 at the initiative of a group of women, relatives of 75 dissidents and independent journalists sentenced to heavy prison terms during the period of repression known as the “black spring” ”.
The EU, the NGO as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International criticized that wave of arrests, calling them political.
The communist regime alleged that they were counterrevolutionaries who were trying to attack national sovereignty on orders from the United States.
The stamp of identity of the group was the Sunday marches to mass of these women, mothers and daughters of convicts, always dressed in white.
In 2005, the Ladies in White received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.