The activist left the Aguilera station in Havana without charges or fines
14ymedio, Havana, 24 September 2024 — Almost three days passed before the police released Berta Soler on Tuesday morning. The leader of the Ladies in White was arrested on Sunday by State Security and her husband, former political prisoner Ángel Moya, repeatedly reported that her whereabouts were unknown and that the authorities said they did not know her whereabouts.
It was Moya himself who reported that at 7:45 am on Tuesday, Soler was released at the Aguilera police station in Havana. After her arrest in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton, the activist was transferred to the Aguilera station, then to Cotorro, and finally back to Aguilera. “During her detention, she was confined in semi-dark cells, without water and without possession of her Bible,” said Moya.
She was released from prison without charges or a fine, and this time – unlike other times – the officers did not threaten her. In a post on Monday, Moya reported that his wife “did not appear in the police registry of detainees.” He explained that he called 106 – the police number for filing complaints – and uploaded the audio of the conversation, in which a receptionist at the Ministry of the Interior told him that they did not have the arrest report. In addition, she asked him to go to the “closest” police station and even suggested that Moya was lying about Soler’s arrest.
As happens every week for her activism against the Ladies in White, Soler was arrested last Sunday in the same place. She was taken to the police unit of the Havana municipality of Cotorro and was released two days later. The activist then denounced, in a video on Facebook, that during the lockdown she was threatened by a State Security agent with a “detention of no return.”
As happens every week because of her activism against the Ladies in White, Soler was arrested last Sunday in the same place
During that time “she was threatened by the repressor Felo, of the State Security, with imprisonment, for not accepting an agreement to end her activism in exchange for going with her husband to the United States” to visit her relatives, Moya said. Regarding the warning, Berta Soler herself said on Sunday morning on Facebook: “I will be on the street and only God knows what can happen. There is no pact with the repressor.”
“This ultimatum that the Cuban regime is giving us,” Soler added in an interview with CubaNet, “this possibility of temporarily leaving the country by removing our ’regulations’ [a prohibition on travel outside the country], is being done to remove Berta Soler and Ángel Moya from above, and also to liquidate or silence the Ladies in White, but that card was played very badly because I am not a person who enters into arrangements with the State Security.”
“Repression has escalated” in recent times against the Ladies in White, the activist said last June, during an interview with the EFE agency.
The members of the Ladies in White in the provinces of Matanzas, Holguín, Villa Clara and Havana have been arrested almost every Sunday since, in January 2022, they decided to go out again to attend mass, after a pause due to the pandemic, in protest to ask for the release of political prisoners, including those of the massive demonstrations of 11 July 2021.
The movement was created by a group of women, relatives of 75 dissidents and independent journalists arrested and sentenced in March 2003 to high prison sentences after the wave of government repression known as the Black Spring. The mobilizations began with a series of Sunday marches to demand their release and became a symbol of dissent, which led to the fact that, in 2005, they were awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Conscience of the European Parliament.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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