Havana/The Ladies in White denounced this Monday the temporary detention of 12 people in Havana and in Matanzas this Sunday, the 89th in which acts of repression have been recorded since they returned to their activities in 2022, 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 Cotorro and Guanabacoa municipalities.
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 arrested and sentenced to long prison sentences in March 2003 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 demand their release and became a symbol of dissidence.
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 that wave of arrests, calling them political, but the Cuban authorities alleged that they were “counterrevolutionaries” who were trying to attack national sovereignty on orders from the United States.
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