Wives and mothers of political prisoners completed an unprecedented week of protest marches in Havana in defiance of the authorities to press for the release of dissidents held for seven years.
“I hope that these [marches] will be the last ones, that there won’t be an eighth anniversary,” said Laura Pollan, the leader of the so-called Ladies in White, as they set out on a march on Sunday to the offices of the National Assembly.
It is the only opposition group on the island that regularly takes their protests to the street, challenging the limits of the Americas’ only one-party communist regime’s tolerance for dissent.
Pro-government counter-protesters were out in force all week, including on Sunday, heckling the women and shouting slogans like “the streets belong to the revolutionaries” and “the streets are with Fidel.”
The women, who march dressed in white and carrying white gladiolas, are demanding the release of the 53 political prisoners who remain locked up seven years after the government’s last major crackdown.
Twenty-two other prisoners have been released for health reasons since the March 2003 arrests, which the opposition calls “Black Spring.”
The women were accompanied by Reyna Luisa Tamayo, the mother of political prisoner Orlando Zapata, who died at age 42 in a hunger strike on Feb. 23 to protest prison conditions. She said her son was tortured and called his death a “premeditated murder;” Cuban authorities denied the claims.
Journalist and psychologist Guillermo Farinas launched another hunger strike the day after Zapata’s death, demanding the release of 26 political prisoners who are in poor health. He has been hospitalized in the city of Santa Clara, 280km east of Havana.
The protests have aroused strong criticism of the Cuban regime in many European countries, the US and among international rights organizations, but Havana has so far dismissed it all as a political campaign.
“It is, really, a colossal deception operation, the longest, most costly and dirtiest in history. It has lasted now half a century,” National Assembly speaker Ricardo Alarcon said.
Departing from a Catholic church, where they first attended mass, the Ladies in White marched through various Havana neighborhoods each day last week, shouting “Liberty.”
On Wednesday, however, in the Parraga district of Havana, the march was interrupted by authorities, who forced the women onto two buses after they had been shoved and hit by government supporters.
The incident prompted the government to reinforce the small group of security agents that normally accompany the marches to prevent incidents, establishing a large police cordon in the subsequent marches.
The government, which accuses the women of being “mercenaries,” and “the point of the spear” of US sponsored “subversion” on the island, carried its version of events for several days in television news shows, which was unusual.
“As a result, even though they speak badly of us, the entire Cuban people know that the Ladies in White are in the street asking for the freedom of our loved ones,” Pollan said.
‘TERRORIST ATTACK’: The convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri resulted in the ‘martyrdom of five of our armed forces,’ the Presidential Leadership Council said A blast targeting the convoy of a Saudi Arabian-backed armed group killed five in Yemen’s southern city of Aden and injured the commander of the government-allied unit, officials said on Wednesday. “The treacherous terrorist attack targeting the convoy of Brigadier General Hamdi Shukri, commander of the Second Giants Brigade, resulted in the martyrdom of five of our armed forces heroes and the injury of three others,” Yemen’s Saudi Arabia-backed Presidential Leadership Council said in a statement published by Yemeni news agency Saba. A security source told reporters that a car bomb on the side of the road in the Ja’awla area in
‘SHOCK TACTIC’: The dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory. Vice Premier Yang Sung-ho was sacked “on the spot,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.” “Please, comrade vice premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said. “He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was
SCAM CLAMPDOWN: About 130 South Korean scam suspects have been sent home since October last year, and 60 more are still waiting for repatriation Dozens of South Koreans allegedly involved in online scams in Cambodia were yesterday returned to South Korea to face investigations in what was the largest group repatriation of Korean criminal suspects from abroad. The 73 South Korean suspects allegedly scammed fellow Koreans out of 48.6 billion won (US$33 million), South Korea said. Upon arrival in South Korea’s Incheon International Airport aboard a chartered plane, the suspects — 65 men and eight women — were sent to police stations. Local TV footage showed the suspects, in handcuffs and wearing masks, being escorted by police officers and boarding buses. They were among about 260 South
A former flight attendant for a Canadian airline posed as a commercial pilot and as a current flight attendant to obtain hundreds of free flights from US airlines, authorities said on Tuesday. Dallas Pokornik, 33, of Toronto, was arrested in Panama after being indicted on wire fraud charges in US federal court in Hawaii in October last year. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday following his extradition to the US. Pokornik was a flight attendant for a Toronto-based airline from 2017 to 2019, then used fake employee identification from that carrier to obtain tickets reserved for pilots and flight attendants on three other
RSS