Tema: Castros’ repression against the dissidents

Castro vs. the Ladies in White
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576530302503295010.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
August 29, 2011
Rocks, iron bars and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.

Rocks and iron bars were the weapons of choice in a government assault on a handful of unarmed women on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on the afternoon of Aug. 7. According to a report issued by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the beatings were savage and "caused them injuries, some considerable."

It was not an isolated incident. In the past two months attacks on peaceful women dissidents, organized by the state security apparatus, have escalated. Most notable is the intensity with which the regime is moving to try to crush the core group known as the Ladies in White.

This is not without risk to the regime, should the international community decide to pay attention and apply pressure on the white-elite regime the way it did in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. But the decision to take that risk suggests that the 52-year-old dictatorship in Havana is feeling increasingly insecure. The legendary bearded macho men of the "revolution," informed by the trial of a caged Hosni Mubarak in an Egyptian courtroom, apparently are terrified by the quiet, prayerful, nonviolent courage of little more than 100 women. No totalitarian regime can shrug off the fearless audacity these ladies display, or the signs that their boldness is spreading.

ED-AO145_amcol0_D_20110827133116.jpgThe Castro brothers' goons are learning that they will not be easily intimidated. Take, for example, what happened that same Aug. 7 morning in Santiago: The women, dressed in white and carrying flowers, had gathered after Sunday Mass at the cathedral for a silent procession to protest the regime's incarceration of political prisoners. Castro supporters and state security officials, "armed with sticks and other blunt objects," according to FIDH, assaulted the group both physically and verbally. The ladies were then dragged aboard a bus, taken outside the city and dropped off on the side of a highway.

Some of them regrouped and ventured out again in the afternoon, this time to hold a public vigil for their cause. That's when they were met by another Castro onslaught. On the same day thugs set upon the homes of former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer and another activist. Six people, including Mr. Ferrer's wife and daughter, were sent to the hospital with contusions and broken bones, according to FIDH.

The Ladies in White first came on the scene in the aftermath of the infamous March 2003 crackdown in which 75 independent journalists and librarians, writers and democracy advocates were rounded up and handed prison sentences of six to 28 years. The wives, mothers and sisters of some of them began a simple act of protest. On Sundays they would gather at the Havana Cathedral for Mass and afterward they would march carrying gladiolas in a silent call for the prisoners' release.

In 2005 the Ladies in White won Europe's prestigious Sakharov prize for their courage. Cellphones that caught the regime's brutality against them on video helped get their story out. By 2010 they had so embarrassed the dictatorship internationally that a deal was struck to deport their imprisoned loved ones along with their family to Spain.

But some prisoners refused the deal and some of the ladies stayed in Cuba. Others joined them, calling themselves "Ladies in Support." The group continued its processions following Sunday Mass in Havana, and women on the eastern end of the island established the same practice in Santiago.

Laura Pollan, whose husband refused to take the offer of exile in Spain and was later released from prison, is a key member of the group. She and her cohorts have vowed to continue their activism as long as even one political prisoner remains jailed. Last week I spoke with her by phone in Havana, and she told me that when the regime agreed to release all of the 75, "it thought that the Ladies in White would disappear. Yet the opposite happened. Sympathizers have been joining up. There are now 82 ladies in Havana and 34 in Santiago de Cuba." She said that the paramilitary mobs have the goal of creating fear in order to keep the group from growing. But the movement is spreading to other parts of the country, places where every Sunday there are now marches.

This explains the terror that has rained down on the group in Santiago and surrounding suburbs on successive Sundays since July and on other members in Havana as recently as Aug. 18.

Last Tuesday, when four women dressed in black took to the steps of the capitol building in Havana chanting "freedom," a Castro bully tried to remove them. Amazingly, the large crowd watching shouted for him to leave them alone. Eventually uniformed agents carried them off. But the incident, caught on video, is evidence of a new chapter in Cuban history, and it is being written by women. How it ends may depend heavily on whether the international community supports them or simply shields its eyes from their torment.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

Ladies in White again attacked in Cuba
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/08/19/2148506/ladies-in-white-again-attacked.html

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
August 19, 2011

MIAMI Cuban government supporters attacked more than 40 members and supporters of Ladies in White in what a spokeswoman called the worst violence against the Havana group since the Catholic Church interceded on their behalf in the spring.

Spokeswoman Berta Soler said the mob punched, slapped and kicked the women, spit on them, pulled their hair and ripped some of their clothes to break up the women's attempt to stage a street protest Thursday.

Several of the 42 women who were attacked reported bruises on their arms and legs but none required medical treatment, Soler and Ladies in White leader Laura Pollan reported Friday by phone from their homes in Havana.

Pollan said the women left her home after their monthly gathering for a "literary tea" for a march to protest violent attacks on the Ladies in White branch in the eastern city of Santiago over the past four weeks.

Forty-seven women had gathered at the house but five did not go out because of age and health issues, she said. Another eight women were detained and taken away by police near her house Thursday morning to keep them from joining the gathering. They were freed later.

Soler said Thursday's attack was the harshest in Havana since March of last year, when the Catholic Church urged the government to halt an increasingly violent string of aggressions against the women during their regular Sunday protests.

"This was a very violent act by the government," she said, adding that the harassments against the Ladies in White, who demand the release of all political prisoners, have been growing more violent since December.

Cuban dissidents are reporting increased government repression across the island this year, amid speculation that the government is applying a tough hand as it tries to enact ambitious and risky reforms to overhaul the island's economy.

"I think the government feels that it is lost and has no options, and is using these terrorist actions against a defenseless population" to keep Cubans in check, Soler said.

Soler said the men in plainclothes who directed Thursday's mob were known to the women as officers of the so-called Confrontation Department, the branch of the Interior Ministry in charge of tracking dissidents and averting their activities.
The Ladies in White, who won the prestigious Sakharov human rights prize in 2005, want to urge Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega to intercede as he did last year, Soler said. But he's out of the country and not expected back until after Aug. 23.

Ortega's intercession meant the Havana women are the only dissidents allowed to stage regular street protests - every Sunday after Mass at the Santa Rita church - by a government that has long claimed "the streets belong to Fidel" Castro.

Government-organized mobs have used violence to keep the women's branch in Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city, from marching after Mass there in what members acknowledge is a campaign to win their own right to take to the streets.

An editorial Friday in the Boston Globe newspaper, meanwhile, noted that Syria is not the only place where "dictatorial rulers have been bloodying their critics" and criticized the attacks by "pro-government goons" against the Ladies in White.

Castro "has nothing to fear from them but their integrity and moral authority. That, however, they have in abundance, while the ruthless regime over which Castro and his brother Fidel have presided for more than half a century has long since lost any claim to the respect or admiration of the free world," it added.

A Cuban website, meanwhile, published a column saying that a machete attack on a dissident in Guantanamo last month was the "spontaneous" work of a government supporter and was not ordered by the government.

Ernesto Carrera Moreno was hospitalized with a cracked skull after he was attacked by a man identified as an official in the municipal directorate of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

The column said Cuban security forces do intervene to protect dissidents "from the people's anger" but added: "Nevertheless, there is a reality: Our people will always respond to any provocation that offends their principles and damages the peace of citizens."

The column was signed by Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy, a Guatemalan living in Havana who has acknowledged working for Cuban intelligence. It was published on the website of the government-run Radio Habana.

The regime apologists blame the attacks on the supporters of the Ladies in White, not in the violence of the goons and thugs prompted by Raúl Castro speech at the sixth communist party congress saying that “it is necessary to make clear that we will never deny the peoples’ right to defend the revolution. The defense of the independence, of the conquests of Socialism and of our streets and plazas will still be the first duty of every Cuban patriot." The regime apologists are very predictable, blame the victim not the aggressor.

Castro vs. the Ladies in White
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576530302503295010.html

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
August 29, 2011
Rocks, iron bars and sticks are no match for the gladiolas and courage of these peaceful Cuban protesters.

Rocks and iron bars were the weapons of choice in a government assault on a handful of unarmed women on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on the afternoon of Aug. 7. According to a report issued by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the beatings were savage and "caused them injuries, some considerable."

It was not an isolated incident. In the past two months attacks on peaceful women dissidents, organized by the state security apparatus, have escalated. Most notable is the intensity with which the regime is moving to try to crush the core group known as the Ladies in White.

This is not without risk to the regime, should the international community decide to pay attention and apply pressure on the white-elite regime the way it did in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. But the decision to take that risk suggests that the 52-year-old dictatorship in Havana is feeling increasingly insecure. The legendary bearded macho men of the "revolution," informed by the trial of a caged Hosni Mubarak in an Egyptian courtroom, apparently are terrified by the quiet, prayerful, nonviolent courage of little more than 100 women. No totalitarian regime can shrug off the fearless audacity these ladies display, or the signs that their boldness is spreading.

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AO145_amcol0_D_20110827133116.jpg

The Castro brothers' goons are learning that they will not be easily intimidated. Take, for example, what happened that same Aug. 7 morning in Santiago: The women, dressed in white and carrying flowers, had gathered after Sunday Mass at the cathedral for a silent procession to protest the regime's incarceration of political prisoners. Castro supporters and state security officials, "armed with sticks and other blunt objects," according to FIDH, assaulted the group both physically and verbally. The ladies were then dragged aboard a bus, taken outside the city and dropped off on the side of a highway.

Some of them regrouped and ventured out again in the afternoon, this time to hold a public vigil for their cause. That's when they were met by another Castro onslaught. On the same day thugs set upon the homes of former political prisoner José Daniel Ferrer and another activist. Six people, including Mr. Ferrer's wife and daughter, were sent to the hospital with contusions and broken bones, according to FIDH.

The Ladies in White first came on the scene in the aftermath of the infamous March 2003 crackdown in which 75 independent journalists and librarians, writers and democracy advocates were rounded up and handed prison sentences of six to 28 years. The wives, mothers and sisters of some of them began a simple act of protest. On Sundays they would gather at the Havana Cathedral for Mass and afterward they would march carrying gladiolas in a silent call for the prisoners' release.

In 2005 the Ladies in White won Europe's prestigious Sakharov prize for their courage. Cellphones that caught the regime's brutality against them on video helped get their story out. By 2010 they had so embarrassed the dictatorship internationally that a deal was struck to deport their imprisoned loved ones along with their family to Spain.

But some prisoners refused the deal and some of the ladies stayed in Cuba. Others joined them, calling themselves "Ladies in Support." The group continued its processions following Sunday Mass in Havana, and women on the eastern end of the island established the same practice in Santiago.

Laura Pollan, whose husband refused to take the offer of exile in Spain and was later released from prison, is a key member of the group. She and her cohorts have vowed to continue their activism as long as even one political prisoner remains jailed. Last week I spoke with her by phone in Havana, and she told me that when the regime agreed to release all of the 75, "it thought that the Ladies in White would disappear. Yet the opposite happened. Sympathizers have been joining up. There are now 82 ladies in Havana and 34 in Santiago de Cuba." She said that the paramilitary mobs have the goal of creating fear in order to keep the group from growing. But the movement is spreading to other parts of the country, places where every Sunday there are now marches.

This explains the terror that has rained down on the group in Santiago and surrounding suburbs on successive Sundays since July and on other members in Havana as recently as Aug. 18.

Last Tuesday, when four women dressed in black took to the steps of the capitol building in Havana chanting "freedom," a Castro bully tried to remove them. Amazingly, the large crowd watching shouted for him to leave them alone. Eventually uniformed agents carried them off. But the incident, caught on video, is evidence of a new chapter in Cuban history, and it is being written by women. How it ends may depend heavily on whether the international community supports them or simply shields its eyes from their torment.

Many in the mainstream media remain silent on the assault by mobs organized by the state security of the regime against the Ladies in White. These peaceful ladies are asking only that their cause be acknowledged and the repression expose.

The majority of the people depend mostly on the mainstream media for their news, but thanks to ideological blinders of many in the mainstream media remain they know very little about the attacks by the Castros’ goons against the peaceful Cuban dissidents.

You have to be blind to defend a regime that treat and abuse these peaceful women like criminals. If you still have a mother or grandmother about the same age of “The Ladies in White”, you would probably have to stop the way you think and analyze yourself seriously.

Is it right for these women to receive this kind of beating? These women already suffer enough punishment for having their love ones behind bars for exercising their freedoms.

A strike by Pakistani students in Cuba drew a show of force from an anti-riot squad not seen before on the streets of the island.

BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com

Posted on Friday, 09.10.10

A Cuban anti-riot squad, previously unseen but surprisingly well-equipped and with fixed bayonets, quelled a Pakistani student protest in Matanzas, a video of the event shows.

Riot police halts student protest in Matanzas, Cuba

This is a forerunner of things to come.On September 08, 2010, a Pakistanis students strike, complaining about the quality of their medical education, was put down by the regime anti-riot squad.

The reasons riot police didn't use force against the students was that the protest wasn’t violent and they were afraid to been recorded and posted in the internet for the whole world to see. If the students have started to throw rocks and bottles, the riot police would have used whatever methods to squelch it. As they said it in the video, “Our hand will not tremble in the face of violence.”

The cell phone video shows Pakistanis medical students besieged by Cuban security dressed in full riot gear and assault rifles with fixed bayonets. Bayonets, other than in drill an ceremonial occasions, are used as a weapon in close combat. To some extent it seems extreme this show of force against unarmed students.

On Cuba’s Capitol Steps
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532563030650924.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Four women speak the unspeakable.
Opinion
August 27, 2011

The four Cuban women who took to the steps of the capitol in Havana last week chanting "liberty" for 40 minutes weren't exactly rebel forces. But you wouldn't know that by the way the Castro regime reacted. A video of the event shows uniformed state security forcibly dragging the women to waiting patrol cars. They must have represented a threat to the regime because they were interrogated and detained until the following day.

The video of the incident recorded an unprecedented show of vocal support from the people for the four women staging the protest. Normally passersby don’t get involve since they fear the crackdown of state security agents and government mobs. The Cuban people are showing more sings that they are on the side of the dissidents.

The four women are exercising their right to freedom of speech. The tyranny is getting more nervous since the tweets of what is happening in Egypt, Libya and Syria are been send to cell phones in Cuba, and people around the world are watching.

New Videos: Crowds Defend Pro-Democracy Activists
Faces of Repression
http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2011/08/new-videos-crowds-defend-democracy.html
at 1:36 AMSaturday, August 27, 2011

Yesterday, Cuban pro-democracy activists, Ivonne Mallesa Galano and Rosario Morales la Rosa, staged a street-corner protest in Havana.

The two women protested during two hour against the Castros regime at the Cuatro Caminos Plaza in the center of Havana banging pots and pans, The onlookers, after the women arrest by the police, fallow them to the police station where they demonstrated their support for them shouting libertad (freedom), libertad, libertad. These incidents demonstrate that the Cuban people are losing fear of the Castros tyranny.

During the Pope's visit, a man shouts "Down with Communism" and is beat down by some in the crowd, no doubt Castro's agents.

Dissidents say police used tear gas in a raid, beat women
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/29/v-fullstory/2380921/dissidents-say-police-used-tear.html

For the first time in years, Cuban police used tear gas in a raid over the weekend. Women also accuse police of beating and sexually harassing them over.


By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
Posted on Monday, 08.29.11

Cuban police used tear gas in a weekend raid against dissidents in eastern Santiago province, where State Security agents also pummeled and made obscene gestures at dissident women, opposition activists reported Monday.
“The riot squad came into th
e house like it was a commando movie, because that’s never been seen in Cuba,” said YulieCQ Valverde, whose husband was one of the 27 dissidents detained during the raid Sunday on their home in the town of Palma Soriano.

It was the first time in recent memory that Cuba was reported to have repressed political dissidents with tear gas and the riot squad, clad in black uniforms and carrying gas masks, shields, helmets, riot batons and tear gas launchers.

But Sunday’s raid was only the latest in a string of reports of unusually strong protests and violent police crackdowns in Cuba, where the communist government has long kept an iron grip on domestic security.

The latest reports came from dissidents and their relatives, and there was no way to independently confirm them. The government has not commented on the weekend incidents, and foreign journalists in Havana reported nothing about them.

Most of the recent incidents took place in Santiago, where members and supporters of the Ladies in White have tried to gather Sundays at the cathedral in the city of Santiago to attend mass and then stage street marches demanding the release of all political prisoners.

The worst incident this weekend came in the town of Palma Soriano, 18 miles to the northwest, where 27 men had gathered Sunday at the home of Marino Antomarchit for a street march protesting the violence against the Ladies in White and other police abuses.

Before the men could hit the street, Valverde said, police sprayed tear gas through the front door and windows and riot squad members in gas masks rushed in, handcuffed the dissidents and took them away in a bus.

“It was like the end of the world,” she said, adding that police also broke up much of her home’s furniture, tore up bedding, seized documents, computers, cameras, cell phones, notebooks and some wallets and ripped up some of the men’s T-shirts, which displayed the word “Change.”

Valverde and José Daniel Ferrer, a dissident who said he watched part of the raid from a distance in order report on the event, told El Nuevo Herald that a fire truck was deployed during the raid, apparently to use its water hoses for crowd control if needed.

Ferrer said he also saw police drag away four or five neighbors who shouted “bullies” and “murderers” at police. Antomarchit’s asthmatic 2 ½ year old daughter, Stefhani, was overcome by the tear gas and evacuated from the house through a window, he added.

The dissidents remained in police detention as of Monday evening, Ferrer said, adding that he had also received reports that one of them, Ruben de Armas Adrouver, was beaten by police and received five stitches on his head.

Ladies in White supporter Caridad Caballero, meanwhile, alleged police pummeled and sexually abused her and Marta Díaz Rondón on Saturday when they tried to travel from their homes in Holguín to Santiago for Sunday mass.

Halfway into the 66-mile trip, police and State Security agents stopped their hired vehicle, dragged them out, shoved them into patrol cars and took them to a police station in nearby Bayamo, she reported.

The police “were shouting at us the whole time, hitting us and making signs and gestures with their fingers that were horrible, grabbing their crotches, something sick, gross,” Caballero told El Nuevo Herald by phone from her home in Holguín.

State Security agents urged the police in Bayamo to strip-search them, but the two women refused to take off their clothes, Caballero added. Police freed them Sunday and drove them back to Holguín.
Ferrer also noted that top State security officers have been contacting him with oddly mixed messages about his fellow Santiago dissidents.

“They told me to go slow, that I am losing some standing with people that support me,” he said, “but that they will jail as many people as needed to keep this from spinning out of their control.” He called the contacts “a trick to halt the protests.”

Also on Sunday, police allegedly beat and detained 13 members and supporters of the Ladies in White who had gathered in a separate Palma Soriano home for an attempt to travel to Santiago for mass at the cathedral.

The women were dragged into a bus that then dropped most of them off at several different locations, said Berta Soler, a spokeswoman for the Ladies in White. She was put on a bus back to her home in Havana, she told El Nuevo Herald before her cell phone went dead. Some remained late Monday in apparent detention.

Dissidents Guillermo Cobas Reyes and Agustin Magdariaga were also detained Sunday in their hometown of El Caney, about four miles from Santiago, according to reports from opposition activists in the province.

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez , a dissident in central Cuba also known as “Antunez,” also reported the weekend detentions of several opposition figures in the eastern province of Camaguey and the westernmost province of Pinar del Rio.

Seven of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, meanwhile, issued a joint statement Monday demanding an end to the violence against the Ladies in White, their supporters and other peaceful dissidents.

“Stop the punches and other abuses!” said the statement by Ferrer, Gisela Delgado Sablón, Guillermo Fariñas, René Gómez Manzano, Iván Hernández Carrillo, Héctor Palacios Ruiz and Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz.

These protests aren’t something new they already started over a year ago. But their frequency, repression, and people participation have been steadily increasing. The residence where dissident members were seeking refuge was tear gassed in order to get them to come out and beaten by the Rapid Response Brigades. This video is another evidence of the growing and strengthening opposition movement in Cuba: