As published in Diario de Cuba, “The seventeenth Sunday of repression against the Ladies in White will be remembered perhaps by the imminent opening of the US embassy in Havana and a performance proposed by the Forum for Rights and Freedoms.”
“The Sunday routine is as follows: The Ladies leave Mass at Santa Rita at 12pm, walk up Fifth Avenue, about five blocks up and down, with gladiolas and photos of political prisoners in their hands. They shout ‘freedom’ and meet in Gandhi park, next to the church, offering a weekly summary, where they give news, denounce repression and offer encouragement. Between 1 and 1:30 pm they finish and go down 26 to 3rd Street where, they well know, they will be arrested violently. So it is, every week.”
“We didn’t move more than one hundred meters, from any direction: to reach the corner or 3rd and 26 where waiting for us was a huge deployment of police buses, patrol cars, motorcycles … and a mob dressed in civilian clothes to the right that joined us at full gallop. They had a criminal look. They did not come there to shout slogans, but to repress and arrest with violence. They say they are paramilitary police, disguised. Obviously they follow orders coming from somewhere and not the people: The people in the neighborhood watched curiously from a distance “
During this seventeenth Sunday of repression there occurred temporary arrests, for a few hours, of approximately 90 dissidents in Cuba, including 60 members of the Ladies in White.
To read the full article (Spanish), click here.