Cuba arrests Ladies in White

The 'Damas de Blanco,' a group of Cuban women seeking the release of political prisoners, held a protest in front of Raúl Castro's office Monday.

from the April 22, 2008 edition

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"I started fighting for my husband, then for the group, and now it's for changes for the better of the country," says Pollán in an interview in her house. "We found qualities in ourselves we did not know we had."

The arrests of Pollán's husband, Héctor Maseda, along with 74 others, took place in a three-day period in 2003, known here as "Black Spring." Human rights activists say that their trials were cobbled together a few weeks later; Mr. Maseda only met his lawyer 15 minutes before the proceeding began. They were dubbed "mercenaries" of the US – because they published in foreign media outlets – and some were given sentences of nearly three decades.

Having nowhere else to turn, the Damas formed almost immediately, and since then they have never missed a Sunday march, including braving three cyclones. They have also been joined by Cubans who were not directly affected by "Black Spring." They have been compared to other women's groups like Argentina's "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo," who protest for the children who were disappeared during that country's "dirty war."

The group always walks with gladioluses in their hands, wearing white to represent the innocence, they say, of their family members – and taking over streets that the government has always maintained belong to revolutionaries. But with their protests – including letters written to state officials and demands for airtime on state-owned television – many see them as today's revolutionaries, the ones trying to change the system. "Their courage is remarkable," says Carlos Serpa Maceira, an independent journalist in Havana, who has documented in photos the harassment of the group by those who consider them "counterrevolutionaries." Many Damas are heckled on the streets. Some have lost their jobs.

In 2005, the Damas won the European Union's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, among its most prestigious human rights awards. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, upon the fifth anniversary of "Black Spring," recently called for the immediate release of the jailed journalists. They have helped garner condemnation around the world, including among left-leaning artists and writers and nations who typically defend Cuba.

"Black Spring" was not the first time Pollán's husband had gotten into trouble. He'd been detained for a day, sometimes two, once for a week. But when Pollán returned from work on March 19, 2003, she found 12 state agents standing in her ransacked home. Authorities confiscated two 1950s-era typewriters and news clippings in which Maseda had underlined comments made by public officials. Pollán says it was his effort to detect contradictions in the national polemic. He was given 20 years for threatening the "sovereignty" of the state.

Yet Hugo Landa, the director of CubaNet, a Miami-based outlet that receives reports from about 40 writers in Cuba, says that "Black Spring" has not curtailed journalism. In fact, Mr. Landa says, it has given more impetus to the trade. Many, like Mr. Serpa Maceira, wake up in the middle of the night, and without access to affordable Internet, they write their stories out longhand in notebooks and type them on computers at various embassies.

"They sent these independent journalists to jail to crush the independent press," says Landa. "But by doing that, they sent such a strong message of repression, that many more started to write."

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