[person_bio image=”https://fhrcuba.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/damas-de-blanco.jpg” name=”Damas de Blanco” url=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_in_White”] is an opposition movement in Cuba consisting of wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents. The women protest the imprisonments by attending Mass each Sunday wearing white dresses and then silently walking through the streets dressed in white clothing.[/person_bio]
The Ladies in White have expressed their participation in the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Charity.
“Well, to make a pilgrimage means to leave passivity, abandon resistance to change, overcome indifference, go searching, construct a project, recuperate ideals, have aspirations and revive the forces…”
“We will celebrate with joy and jubilation the 400 years since the discovery of the image of the Virgin of Charity, Patron of all Cubans.”
“We will go the house of the Virgin of Charity, the house of Jesus, the house of God the Father and the house of all of us his daughters and of all of us Cubans who want a better Cuba. We will ask and implore that our prayers, our petitions for the end of abuse, maltreatment, violence, repression, and cruelty toward us by the government all be heard. We will ask that political prisoners be liberated and that the right of the Cuban be valued,” they have expressed.
“We will be there on September 8th, walking and taking our hearts to our late leader, Laura Pollán, who will walk alongside us,” says her daughter Laura Maria.
September 8th marks one year since Laura Pollán Toleda, alongside her daughter and a group of Ladies in White from the eastern part of the country, were verbally and physically assaulted outside the shrine of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre in Santiago of Cuba. These two women were taken prisoners and withheld for eleven hours in a police unit of that province.
Laura Pollán and her daughter remained standing in silence those eleven hours in protest and repudiation of the cruelty that has been committed to them and the rest of the women, violations now and again of their right to walk and exercise freely through the streets of their homeland.
Laura Maria Labrada Pollán once again denounces the Cuban government and the security of the state for the atrocities that took place that 8th of September of 2011, an event that enormously impacted the health of her mother, Laura Pollán.