The Lady in White was released without charges on Wednesday, after 72 hours in detention
14ymedio/EFE, Havana, 14 November 2024 — The leader of the Cuban opposition women’s movement Ladies in White, Berta Soler, was released on Wednesday after being detained for more than 72 hours last Sunday outside the organization’s headquarters in the Havana neighborhood of Lawton, according to her husband, former political prisoner and activist Ángel Moya.
According to Moya’s testimony, State Security agents dressed in plain clothes took Soler in a car to the Aguilera police unit, where the activist refused the medical check-up they tried to perform on her. Later, the leader of the Ladies in White was taken to the Cotorro unit and confined in a cell without a mattress and in precarious conditions, including the lack of water.
Moya reported that a State Security agent, identified as Felo, asked Soler “when he was going to leave Cuba to see his grandchildren and children.”
The activist was taken back to Aguilera on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. and released at 6:15 “without charges.”
The activist was taken back to Aguilera on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. and released at 6:15 a.m. “without charges.”
Members of the Ladies in White in Havana, Matanzas, Villa Clara and other towns on the island have been temporarily detained, and in some cases fined, on 102 Sundays since 2022, when the group decided to resume its usual Sunday marches after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Ladies in White movement was created by a group of female relatives of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists who in March 2003 received long prison sentences 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 in a Catholic church they began to hold Sunday marches to demand their release.
The European Union and NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International criticized the wave of arrests, calling them political, while the regime accused them of being counter-revolutionaries who were trying to undermine national sovereignty on the orders of the United States.
In 2005, the Ladies in White received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.
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