Cuba’s Ladies in White Report 12 Arrests in Havana and Matanzas on the Weekend

It is Sunday number 89 of the repression of the group since they resumed their activities in 2022, after the pandemic

María García Álvarez and Yudaxis Pérez Meneses were arrested in Colón this Sunday. / Yudaxis Pérez

14ymedio biggerEFE (via 14ymedio), Havana, June 4, 2024 — On Monday, the Ladies in White denounced the temporary detention of 12 people in Havana and in Matanzas a day earlier, making it the 89th Sunday with acts of repression recorded since 2022, when they returned to their activities after the pandemic. The leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler, and her husband, former political prisoner Ángel Moya, reported the arrests on social networks.

They also reported the arrest of 10 members of the Ladies in White in the towns of Cárdenas, Colón, Perico and Unión de Reyes, all in Matanzas.

Soler and Moya reported that, as on previous Sundays, they were arrested when leaving the headquarters of the Ladies in White, located in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton, and later taken separately to the police units of the municipalities of Cotorro and Guanabacoa.

Both were released on Monday morning, after the authorities imposed fines on them, according to Moya.

The Ladies in White movement was created by a group of women, relatives of 75 dissidents and independent journalists who were arrested and sentenced in March 2003 to long prison sentences after a wave of repression by the Cuban Government known as the Black Spring.

The wives, mothers and other relatives of those prisoners began a series of Sunday marches to ask for their release and became a symbol of dissent.

In 2005, the Ladies in White received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Conscience from the European Parliament. The EU and NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International criticized the wave of arrests, classifying them as political, but the Cuban authorities alleged that the women were “counter-revolutionaries” who tried to attack national sovereignty under orders of the United States.

Translated by Regina Anavy
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