The 60-year-old dissident, who has been arrested almost every Sunday since 2022 for trying to walk to Mass in protest, says she feels that lately “the repression has intensified.”
EFE (via 14ymedio), Madrid, 22 June 2024 — The veteran Cuban dissident Berta Soler is clear when asked why she continues to lead the Ladies in White movement for political prisoners after more than 20 years: “Resistance and conscience,” she says in an interview with EFE.
This 60-year-old Cuban, who has been arrested almost every Sunday since 2022 for trying to walk to mass in protest, says she feels that lately “the repression has intensified.”
“If you are aware of what you do and why you fight, age or illness doesn’t matter or that they put you in a dungeon, because they do this on Sundays to frighten us, so that we get tired, so that we are afraid and give up,” she says.
With that premise she states: “We will continue to take to the streets, doing our job, because if there is awareness, love for what you do, you continue.”
“I chose this path because my people need it, because the prisoners need it,” adds Soler, who intends to continue “until they are all free.”
“We are going to keep taking to the streets, doing our job, because if there is awareness, love for what you do, you continue”
For her, and for all of Cuba, she argues, the anti-government demonstrations of 11 July 2021 (11J), the largest protests in decades, meant a before and an after, and she is convinced that they could be repeated.
According to the NGO Prisoner Defenders, there are currently more than 1,100 political prisoners in Cuba, a designation that Soler defends “because they went out to demonstrate their disagreement with the regime although they didn’t belong to any dissident organization,” and, therefore, “they are political prisoners, not bandits.”
“On 11J the people went out to demand freedom, democracy and rights. The reasons that led these people to take to the streets are present and are getting worse every day,” she emphasizes, pointing to the serious crisis that the island is suffering.
Soler says that now “the people speak, express their discontent, their concern, and no one takes the step to defend this so-called revolution.” She believes that “one day they will take to the streets again.”
“At any moment there may be another 11J, but bigger,” she warns.
She says that the “harassment” she suffers from State Security, “the persecution, arrests and threats of imprisonment,” are because the authorities believe that dissidents can “take part and activate, encourage, support and guide” if a protest arises.
Regarding her own case, she says that she and her husband, former political prisoner Ángel Moya, are under “constant surveillance.” In addition to the three cameras around their house, headquarters of the Ladies in White, she reports permanent monitoring and the detention of dissidents who try to visit her.
“We don’t have a free, normal life, like other citizens. Our daily life is not so everyday,” she summarizes.
Soler explains that of the 450 Ladies in White that came to be, there are now barely 40 active. Most left the country, while others are in jail for participating in 11J, such as Aymara Nieto, Jacqueline Heredia, Sayli Navarro, Sissy Abascal and Tania Echavarría.
“After others joined us, we decided to dress in white because it signifies peace, love and purity, and we went for a walk carrying gladiolas.”
Soler was one of the first Ladies in White, a collective that emerged to demand the release of their relatives: the 75 dissidents, independent journalists and activists convicted in the repressive wave of the so-called Black Spring of March 2003.
She explained that seven women began to attend Mass on Sundays in the church of Santa Rita in Havana to “pray and advocate for the freedom” of their relatives.
“After others joined us, we decided to dress in white because it signifies peace, love and purity, and we went for a walk with gladiolas in our hands,” she recalls. Two years later they received the Sakharov Prize of the European Union (EU) for Freedom of Conscience.
Among those convicted was her husband, who after being released from prison in 2011 decided to stay in Cuba, unlike many of his peers, and she continued with her activism.
Neither Soler nor Moya contemplate leaving Cuba, although she states that State Security has proposed it to her. They would like to travel outside – their children and grandchildren live in the United States – but they fear that the authorities will not let them re-enter, and there are precedents for this.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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