Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused Poland on Thursday of submitting to Washington.
EFE (via 14ymedio), Havana, 4 September 2025 — Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez accused Poland on Thursday of submitting to Washington after Warsaw bestowed an award on the historic Cuban dissident Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White.
Rodríguez, on an official visit to Beijing with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, responded on social media to a comment from his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, following the presentation of the Lech Walesa Solidarity Award.
“Minister: We Cubans have lived in freedom and democracy since January 1, 1959 (the day of the Triumph of the Revolution), even though the United States government has been trying to subjugate us for 66 years, just as it has been able to do with others,” Rodríguez wrote, in an apparent reference to Poland.
Sikorski had previously responded to a message on Rodriguez’s social media account, stressing that the award was given to those who “peacefully fought for freedom and democracy” and adding that Cubans also “deserved” both.
Sikorski wrote that the award was given to those who “peacefully fought for freedom and democracy.”
The Polish Foreign Minister also clarified that, despite having been announced at a joint event with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the award was a Polish initiative fully funded by that European country.
In his message, Sikorski cited a previous reaction from Rodríguez in which the Cuban foreign minister claimed that the prize was part of Rubio’s “corrupt and anti-Cuban agenda” and seemed to suggest that the award was “US taxpayer money.”
The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs recognized Berta Soler on Tuesday with the Lech Walesa Solidarity Prize, worth one million Polish zloty (approximately $273,400), which is awarded to “support the actions of those who, by fighting for solidarity and democracy, change the course of history.”
Soler later told EFE that the award is “the result of 22 years of struggle in Cuba for the freedom of all unjustly imprisoned political prisoners and for all Cuban rights” with the Ladies in White.
The movement Soler leads emerged from the initiative of a group of women, all of them relatives of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms in March 2003 during the period of repression known as the Black Spring.
From then on, the wives, mothers, and other relatives of those prisoners identified themselves by always wearing white, and after attending mass at a Catholic church, they began holding Sunday marches to demand their release, becoming a symbol of dissent.
In 2005, the Ladies in White received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.
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