Women have the power: Cuba's Ladies in White

Laura Pollan, center with cast, leader of Ladies in White, a group of female dissidents, takes part in a march marking the anniversary of a major government crackdown on dissent, in Havana, Thursday, March 18, 2010. The crackdown took place in Cuba on March 18, 2003. (AP Photo/Javier Galeano)

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent." - Martin Luther King Jr. Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968

“Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” – Mohandas Gandhi

Media analysis of the latest release of Cuban political prisoners tends to focus on the role of Spanish Foreign Minister Moratinos or Cardinal Jaime Ortega or whether or not the Castro brothers are easing up and if they are willing to open up Cuba. That is all well and good but overlooks the most important factor in this latest round of political prisoners being released: the civic resistance and its impact in the wider population and in the regime itself.

On the eve of his assassination Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the greatest speeches of his life: "I See the Promised Land" in which he seemed to forecast his own death but he also made a number of observations critical for any non-violent resistance movement among them that: “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

The example of Cuba’s Ladies in White is an application of the above observation. Their movement was born out of repression. On March 18, 2003 the Castro regime began a crackdown in which 75 activists were rounded up, their homes searched, then summary trials and long prison sentences ranging up to 28 years in prison in what became known as Cuba's Black Spring. Twelve days later on March 30, 2003 the Cuban Ladies in White attended mass at the Santa Rita de Casia Church and began their Sunday walks. There was nothing inevitable about this movement, but without their courage and determination there loved ones would still be imprisoned.

Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall in their essay “People Power Primed: Civilian Resistance and Democratization” offer a definition of “people power” that encapsulates how the Ladies in White operated:

Protest by itself cannot pry a ruler from office because power does not come from a public show; it comes from applying force. When directed strategically by a civilian-based movement, protest is only one of many nonviolent tactics, including strikes, boycotts, blockades, and hundreds of other acts of economic and social disruption that can dissolve the political or military support beneath a ruler. The power in “people power” is best understood as the yield from detonating these nonviolent weapons.

The Ladies in White and their weekly marches defying the dictatorship’s restrictions on public demonstrations since 2003 was but one of several tactics they used in an effort to obtain their relatives release from prison. For example, in October of 2004, Berta Soler delivered a note to Fidel Castro at the Communist Party headquarters in Revolution Square demanding that her husband, prisoner of conscience Angel Moya, who suffered from a herniated disc be sent to the hospital. She then set up a vigil that turned into a three day sit-in nearby in a park next to Revolution Square along with other women from the movement on a Tuesday. State security broke up the protest at dawn three days later and drove them home. Later that day her husband had been transferred to Carlos Finlay military hospital. The petition backed by a vigil and sit-in had achieved its immediate goal.

Along the way the Ladies in White found solidarity from women, who did not have relatives imprisoned, that joined them in their marches and became known as the Ladies in Support. This development made the dictatorship uneasy because the regime has always used a strategy of isolating the opposition from the general population and this movement was tearing that dividing wall.

On February 23, 2010 prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 83 days on hunger strike protesting the brutal and inhumane conditions in Cuban prisons. During his water only strike prison officials denied him water for more than two weeks and contributed to his death. In the arsenal of nonviolent “weapons” the hunger strike is the military equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction only in reverse.

Michael Nagler co-founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC, Berkeley, where he taught an Introduction to Nonviolence and Nonviolence Today. His lectures are available online, I highly recommend them. In the second lecture of his Introduction to Nonviolence in Fall of 2006 Nagler at 46:38 offers an observation on what is a hunger strike:

"You are not killing yourself but you are saying to the person that your behavior is so unacceptable that if you continue it its going to kill me. It is an extreme case of taking on the suffering that is in a situation." ...This is different from a threat because what you are saying to the person is "I am going to exhibit to you mirror back to you the ultimate consequences of what you are doing." ... "This is an act of truth. You are killing us - you are killing our people and I'm going to show you that you are doing it to awaken your conscience."

This is precisely what Orlando Zapata Tamayo was doing and its reverberations are still being felt today in Cuba and around the world. However, if it had not been for his mother and Lady in White, Reina Tamayo, battling to see her son and denouncing the abuses by Cuban state security against her and her son the news of his death would have been obscured and covered up by the prison authorities. Following her son’s death she demanded and continues to demand a thorough investigation of his death and an independent autopsy to ascertain the cause of death.

The decision of the Ladies in White to escalate and to demonstrate for 7 days straight on the seventh anniversary of the March 18, 2003 crackdown led the regime to respond by escalating its repression against them. Violent mobs organized by the dictatorship, not for the first time, brutalized them in coordination with Cuban State Security, but despite bruises, and in some cases broken bones, they continued to return each day for more after being dragged away. In the end international and domestic outrage led the regime to search for a face saving alternative.

The question raised, by Gandhi’s observation at the top of the page, is how do enough people withdraw their cooperation with a government that will shrink the government’s legitimacy and raise the costs of enforcing its will? Ackerman and Duvall in their People Power Primed essay offer an answer:

The instrument for bringing this about is a self-organized movement, which political scientist Sidney Tarrow describes as having “the power to trigger sequences of collective action” based on a unified frame for common goals. When nonviolent movements of this kind have drained a ruler’s sources of support, the results have changed history.

In the Cuban case there have been a number of actions that to varying degrees have been able to generate dramatic impacts in Cuba. However, over the past seven years, in the midst of a massive crackdown in which many opposition leaders were imprisoned, the Ladies in White maintained a focus on their specific objectives and the means to achieve them that was courageous, disciplined and led to a series of collective actions from the weekly marches following Mass at Santa Rita Church to sit-ins and interventions all in the service of the freedom of Cuba's political prisoners.

When Laura Pollán responded to the regime’s brutality stating: “They can either kills us, put us in jail or release them. We will never stop marching no matter what happens.” The dictatorship knew what its options were, and because harassment, intimidation, and beatings had not worked; realized that this movement was serious about enduring great suffering. The death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo and his mother’s courageous response despite death threats and violence in February 2010 only underlined the truth of Pollán’s statement.

It also underlined the truth of strategic scholar Thomas Schelling's observation nearly a half-century ago that:

“The tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions. They can deny him most of what he wants—they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration. And he can deny them just about everything they want—he can deny it by using the force at his command.... It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.”

This latest release of political prisoners is a victory for the Ladies in White, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, and Guillermo Fariñas Hernández. Nevertheless the struggle continues for a free Cuba in which the laws that imprisoned these prisoners of conscience are repealed so that systematic human rights violations come to an end. Even if in the near future Cuba's political prisoners are all released and no new one's locked up (which would be wonderful and unprecedented considering the past half century in Cuba) as long as the repressive laws, rapid response brigades, and short term detentions continue within a dictatorship in which Cubans are not able to exercise their human rights without repression the nonviolent civic struggle will continue.

Cuba's Olga Guillot, Queen of the Bolero: Singer and Victim of Cuba's Cultural Genocide

“We are united in a cause that is really important. We are united with women who are heroes and who are the only ones who have done for Cuba’s political prisoners, for the exile community, for the dissidents, for the opponents of the government and for us who have been 50 years in exile without a country these women have made news around the world so that the world know the pain of our Cuba. Thank you for giving us our heroes. Thank you. We will continue our fight. And while they march with bouquets of flowers in their hands--the only weapons they have. We, too, will continue to march in support of them. Thank you, Long Live a Free Cuba!

- Olga Guillot, Ladies in White Demonstration, March 25, 2010

International media are reporting on the passing of Olga, artists are recalling their friendships with her and Olga's impact in music and culture around the world but not in her homeland Cuba. The Miami Herald reported how fans and friends stretched out over 8 city blocs to pay tribute to La Reina del Bolero -- The Queen of Bolero.

According to the book Shoot the singer!: music censorship today edited by Marie Korpe there is increasing concern within the international music community that post-revolution generations are growing up without knowing or hearing these censored musicians and that this could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations. One of the musicians to undergo this process is Olga Guillot.

Wikipedia offers the following description of Olga's career:

Olga Guillot (born October 9, 1922 in Santiago de Cuba - died July 12, 2010 in exile in Miami, Fl) is a famous Cuban singer who was known to be the queen of bolero. She is a native of the Cuban city of Santiago. In 1954, she recorded her song "Mienteme" ("Lie to Me"), which became a hit across Latin America, and earned her three consecutive awards back home in Cuba as Cuba's best female singer. 1958 proved to be an important year for Guillot, as she toured Europe for the first time, including stops in Italy, France, Spain and Germany.

She sang alongside the equally legendary Édith Piaf during a concert held in Cannes. Olga Guillot kept a house in Cuba as she traveled around the world with her music, apart from her house in Mexico. But Guillot opposed Fidel Castro's Government, and, in 1961, she decided to leave Cuba for good and establish herself in Venezuela. Not long after that, she left Venezuela, making Mexico her only permanent residence country.

Kenia Fernandez wrote in article in My Latino Voice titled "Nostalgia Corner: Why the Bolero was censored in Cuba which describes how the Bolero was banned in Cuba:

First, jukeboxes were confiscated from corner bars and nightclubs (there were as many as 20,000 jukeboxes in Havana in the 1950s). Then, in 1961, at the First Congress of Writers and Artists, music was defined as an organ of integration into the new Revolutionary society. The bolero came to be seen as a reactionary genre, in bad taste, and ultimately, banned. Cuba's world-class composers and performers, many of whom had brought the genre to its golden age, were abruptly silenced. Finally, in 1968, in the Ofensiva Revolucionaria -- the Cuban equivalent of China's Cultural Revolution -- most of the 1,200 cabarets and dance halls for which Havana was known were shut down (with only a couple of exceptions, including the notable Tropicana). Bolero lovers and performers were left with no viable venues. An entire generation was traumatized by loss of the very words and music that had defined the key moments of their lives -- coming of age, first loves, stolen kisses, secret romances.

Olga speaks in defense of the Ladies in White on March 25, 2010



Olga Guillot is one of many Cuban artists disappeared by the Cuban regime from Cuba's cultural life in what music censorship experts have described as a cultural genocide. She like Celia Cruz would be erased from Cuban culture under the communist dictatorship in Cuba. Both would never be able to physically return to Cuba because of the communist dictatorship there in power that banned their music and made the nonpersons. Please engage in an act of cultural resistance and rescue help spread their music and that of other censored artists into Cuba by any means at your disposal. Olga and Celia may not be able to return to Cuba physically, but there music and their place in Cuban culture can be restored.



Her long and talented life ended on July 12, 2010 but she will always be remembered for her music and as a Cuban who suffered a long exile from her homeland thanks to a brutal dictatorship that banned her music. Requiescat in pace Olga Guillot, Queen of the Bolero and Cuban patriot. We, free Cubans and children of Cubans, will make sure that your music and your cultural legacy are restored in Cuba.

"13 de Marzo" Tugboat Massacre: 16 years later

Remembering a barbaric crime and 16 years demanding justice

Sixteen years later and the names and faces of the victims continue to be seen on the internet and we remember. We continue to demand justice.




Fifteen years ago, one year after the massacre, Cuban exiles gathered together in a flotilla and peacefully invaded Cuban national territory to travel to the spot where the "13 de Marzo" tugboat sank and where the human remains of the 37 victims still reside never returned to their families to this day to hold religious services for them. Hard to believe that its been 15 years. I found an old essay written by a member of the Free Cuba Foundation just returned from the flotilla on July 14, 1995 and reproduce excerpts below:

It is still dark when we leave. We pray together for the fulfillment of our non-violent ceremony. We jump aboard a forty foot lobster boat. Ramon Saul Sanchez comes to our boat embraces and shakes hands with some of us. He apologizes that they don't have more room on the lead boat so that we can all travel together. A WSVN reporter and cameraman join us on departure and begin to do interviews. "This is a bad sign," someone says. "How do you figure?" replies another. "This is channel 7 covering us," he continues,"don't you know their motto: if it bleeds it leads." Gentle laughter among those who hear the exchange. Later they leave on a speed boat to interview someone else. We sleep and talk. As the hours pass and the sun climbs higher. Anticipation mounts The smell of diesel and the choppy seas take their toll on the passengers. All of a sudden dozens of dolphins start jumping in the wake of the boat. God's creatures living free on the open sea. A sense of emotional uplift spreads through the boat. Temporarily we forget our worries and enjoy these creatures entertaining themselves and us.

[...]

As we near the12 mile limit we begin to see Cuban aircraft circling. We wave our flags and sing the Cuban national athem. Joy fills our hearts our mission has been partially accomplished. We can see Democracia in the distance leading us further into Cuban waters. One of my compatriots asks if we have entered Cuban waters. Yes, we tell him. He throws a bucket over the side and draws the Cuban water out and pours it into a bottle shaped like the Virgin. This was his holy water: Cuban water. At this point we begin to see a military helicopter circling the flotilla. We wave our flags and shout our greetings. The Brothers to the Rescue fly formation with some of the Cuban planes. We see a MiG high overhead, and I feel proud of these pilots in small propellar driven aircraft facing off with military helicopters and MiGs.

As we continue in, we can see the Havana skyline. Someone says they see someone signaling with a mirror from one of the buildings. We begin to make out four dots leaving the island and growing larger. We continue in further. La Democracia speeds ahead. As the ships grow larger; we can see that they are gunboats. Our captain stops. His brother tells him to go further, "know when to say when," he responds. As he ponders whether to go further or not. We stare out across the water as La Democracia tries to evade the gunboats and make it to the 6 mile limit. We can see the two gunboats pass on both sides of the ship. La Democracia turns around and speeds towards us. They're radio has been knocked out. We need to call the Coast guard. They've been rammed. They have wounded on board, among them Dade County Commisioner Pedro Reboredo, who is going into shock. Our captain radioed in and heads out as fast as the engines will take him.

I learn later that two of the Brothers to the Rescue planes flew over Havana and dropped bumper stickers over the capitol. This was done as a diversionary tactic when the Democracia was attacked by the Cuban gunboats. The bumper stickers read: "Comrades no. Brothers."

Today, as we've done since 1995 we will hold a silent vigil for justice for the 37 Cuban men, women, and children extra-judicially executed on July 13, 1994. Wherever you are in the world I hope you'll join us in continuing the demand for justice.

''There are those who think that we should be full of rancor and a thirst for vengeance but I don't want revenge. I feel sorry for the people who assassinated my family. I can never be compensated for my loss. I will never be happy again with my family surrounding me. There will always be a tinge of sadness but I do want there to be a trial so that this situation can serve as a lesson and that these people or others like them in other parts of the world, don't do this kind of thing again. Not in Cuba. Not anywhere.''

Jorge García, July 13, 2004 (A decade after July 13, 1994 tugboat massacre)

Germany 1943 & Cuba 2003: Women Defy Tyrants to Save Loved Ones and Succeed

The Ladies protest in the streets: Rosenstrasse 1943 & Fifth Avenue 2003

The power of nonviolent resistance is often overlooked by historians. International media are paying attention to the release of Cuban prisoners of conscience and analyzing the motives of the Cuban dictatorship and the role played by the Spanish Foreign Minister, the Cuban Cardinal, and others. One area that gets short shrift is the nonviolent dynamic.

Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s 83 day hunger strike and his death generated outrage around the world but the dictatorship is used to that. The July 13, 1994 massacre of 37 Cuban men, women, and children; the February 24, 1996 extrajudicial murder of four members of Brothers to the Rescue blown to bits by missiles fired from a Cuban MiG; and even the extrajudicial killing of Danish student Joachim Løvschall shot to death by an AK47 wielding soldier on March 29, 1997. All these were atrocities that generated international outrage led the regime to smear the victims and tried to shift blame. The same tactic was repeated with Orlando Zapata Tamayo.

The Ladies in White and their weekly marches defying the dictatorship’s restrictions on public demonstrations since 2003 and their decision to march for 7 days straight on the seventh anniversary of the March 18, 2003 crackdown led the regime to escalate its repression against them. Fascist mobs organized by the dictatorship brutalized them and with Cuban State Security dragged them away, but despite bruises and in some cases broken bones they continued to return each day for more. In the end international outrage, and apparently outrage from Cubans on the island led the regime to blink.

This is not the first time that a group of women have challenged a brutal dictatorship.

In 1943 the Nazi regime forced German women married to Jewish husbands to take radical action or lose them forever in death camps. The book, A Force More Powerful, describes how housewives frustrated the aims of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich:

On February 27, 1943, SS soldiers and local Gestapo agents began seizing the Jews of Berlin in an operation called "the Final Roundup." They were loaded onto trucks and taken to the Jewish community's administration building at Rosenstrasse 2-4, in the heart of the city. The goal was finally to make the city judenfrei (free of Jews), necessitating the forcible collection of Jews with German spouses and their Mischling (mixed ancestry) children. For two years these Jews had escaped the jaws of the Holocaust because they or their German spouses were essential for the war effort, and the regime wanted no unpleasantness on the home front. But the stunning military defeat at Stalingrad earlier that month shattered German morale and led Hitler to call for "Total War," against Jews inside Germany as well as Allied armies.¹

Word spread quickly about the abductions in Berlin, and before long a group of non-Jewish German women had gathered on the Rosenstrasse with food and other personal items for their Jewish husbands and children, whom they believed were being held inside. One of the women, Charlotte Israel, arrived and found 150 women already huddled outside. She asked one of the guards for her husband's potato ration cards, which he went to get. On the back of a card, her husband Julius wrote, "I'm fine." Other women began asking for personal effects to confirm that their husbands were inside and, soon after, began demanding their release. One woman's brother, a soldier on leave, approached an SS guard and said, "If my brother-in-law is not released, I will not return to the front." The crowds grew considerably despite the winter chill, and soon women waited outside day and night, holding hands, singing songs, and chanting "Let our husbands go!" By the second day of the protest, over 600 women were keeping a vigil on the Rosenstrasse.

This was not the first time many of these women had voiced dissent. For over a decade they and their families had challenged Nazi racial policies through letters and small demonstrations, insisting that the regime would be hurting fellow Germans by persecuting their Jewish spouses. Hitler and his circle had always tried to minimize unrest and avoid the kind of domestic opposition that German rightists saw as the "stab in the back" that had crippled the German effort during World War I. Until this point the regime had largely managed to keep the genocide against the Jews a secret. But when it affected a group who were unafraid to speak out against Nazi policies, that secrecy was jeopardized.

What gave further resonance to the wives' protest was that it was happening in the heart of Berlin, a city that had never been enthusiastic about Nazism. Cosmopolitan Berliners always saw it as a crude Bavarian aberration. Moreover, Berlin was the German base for foreign news organizations that still operated during the war. If political malcontents or the wire services were to get wind of the protest, the myth of the omnipotent Nazi state could be exposed. In fact, London radio did report on the demonstrations.

By the third day SS troops were given orders to train their guns on the crowd but to fire only warning shots. They did so numerous times, scattering the women to nearby alleyways. But the wives always returned and held their ground. They knew the soldiers would never fire directly at them because they were of German blood. Also, arresting or jailing any of the women would have been the rankest hypocrisy: According to Nazi theories, women were intellectually incapable of political action. So women dissenters were the last thing the Nazis wanted to have Germans hear about, and turning them into martyrs would have ruined the Nazis' self-considered image as the protector of motherhood.

The campaign soon expanded to include women and men who were not in mixed marriages. The ranks of protestors bulged to a thousand, with people chanting to let the prisoners go and taunting the SS soldiers. Joseph Goebbels, seeking to stop more from arriving, closed down the nearest streetcar station, but women walked the extra mile from another station to reach Rosenstrasse 2-4. By the end of the week Goebbels saw no alternative but to let the prisoners go. Some thirty-five Jewish male prisoners, who had already been sent to Auschwitz, were ordered to gather their belongings and board a passenger train back to Berlin.

Without fully realizing what they had done, the Rosenstrasse women had forced the Nazis to make a choice: They could accede to a limited demand and pay a finite cost - 1,700 prisoners set free, if all the intermarried Jewish men were released. Or they could open a Pandora's box of heightened protest in the center of the capital and brutalize German women in the bargain. For the Nazis, maintaining social control was more important than making sure every last Jew made it to the gas chambers. The regime that terrorized the rest of Europe found itself unable to use violence against a challenge on its very doorstep. The Nazis were savage but they were not stupid.

Sixty years and a few days later on March 18, 2003 the Castro regime began a crackdown in which 75 activists were rounded up, their homes searched, then summary trials and long prison sentences ranging up to 28 years in prison for exercising their fundamental human rights in what became known as Cuba's Black Spring. Twelve days later on March 30, 2003 the Cuban Ladies in White attended church at the Santa Rita de Casia Church and walked down the middle of Fifth Avenue in Miramar, Havana.

Over the next seven years despite all sorts of threats, harassment, and attempts to divide and destroy their movement these women continued to march, lobby, and protest their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons imprisonment. After the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo on February 23, 2010 and as the seventh anniversary of Cuba’s Black Spring approached the Ladies in White announced that they would march for seven days demanding their imprisoned relatives’ freedom. The regime’s response was to organize mobs along with Cuban State Security to harass, intimidate, and physically brutalize them. Despite this each day the Ladies in White would gather and face the mobs and the physical assaults. In the midst of all this their chief spokesperson Laura Pollán responded to the regime’s brutality stating: “They can either kills us, put us in jail or release them. We will never stop marching no matter what happens.”

Five months later through the intercession of the Catholic Church the dictatorship responded by ending the mob attacks on the Ladies in White and announced that the men arrested in March of 2003 would all finally be released over the next 3 to 4 months. The persistence, courage and long term vision of these Cuban women led to a power dynamic where the regime was obligated to negotiate using the Catholic Church as a mediator to end this stand off.

Like the Nazis in 1943 the Cuban dictatorship in 2010 hopes that by meeting the Ladies in White’s demands [releasing the political prisoners] that they will stop marching, and go away. Time will tell, but the democratic opposition in Cuba, regardless of the outcome, should study the tactics and strategies of the Ladies in White over the past seven years look at what worked and did not work and apply it to future efforts in the struggle for a free and democratic Cuba.

Amnesty International: Cuba urged to immediately release all prisoners of conscience

”Forcing them to leave the country would be yet another attempt to suppress freedom of expression and movement in Cuba,” - Amnesty International.

8 July 2010

AI Index: PRE01/230/2010

Amnesty International calls on the Cuban government to immediately free all prisoners of conscience, after authorities yesterday said 52 prisoners will be released.

Five of the 52 detainees, whose names are yet to be revealed, are due to be released shortly, while the remaining prisoners will be freed within 3 to 4 months, according to the agreement announced by Church officials yesterday.

“We welcome the commitment to release these prisoners but there is no reason why all 53 prisoners of conscience held in Cuba, should not be released immediately.” said Susan Lee, Americas Programme Director at Amnesty International.

“These men have been imprisoned since 2003 simply for peacefully expressing their political beliefs and should be released unconditionally now.”

One prisoner of conscience allegedly not included in the release plan, lawyer Rolando Jiménez Posada, is serving a 12 year prison sentence after being convicted of “disrespecting authority and revealing secrets about state security police” following his peaceful manifestation of support for political prisoners. Amnesty International is calling for his immediate release.

The Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, said the released prisoners and their families could settle in Spain, following talks he held with Cuban authorities and Roman Catholic Church officials in Havana.

It is not clear whether the men would be given the option to remain in Cuba.

”Forcing them to leave the country would be yet another attempt to suppress freedom of expression and movement in Cuba,” Susan Lee.

The 52 were detained during the “Black Spring” crackdown in March 2003, when 75 dissidents were arrested, of which 23 have already been released.

Amnesty International declared them prisoners of conscience, as they acted non-violently and were imprisoned under Cuban legislation which illegitimately criminalizes political dissent.

The deal follows protests by Guillermo Fariñas, an independent journalist who says he is nearing death after being on hunger strike for more than 4 months calling for the release of prisoners of conscience that suffer serious medical conditions. Prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo, died on 22 February this year, after 11 weeks on hunger strike.

Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Cuban government to immediately and unconditionally release all prisoners of conscience.

“The government must now fulfil its promise and immediately release these prisoners who should never have been jailed in the first place.”

Cuban authorities continue to deny the existence of political prisoners in the country, asserting that “nobody has ever been punished for merely expressing a difference of opinion or point of view, even when these have been contrary to those of the authorities.”

Amnesty International calls for the remaining political prisoners to be granted prompt and fair trials.

“The Cuban government must also end the harassment and intimidation of independent journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents.

”Vague and arbitrarily applied legal provisions, used to curb dissent within Cuba, must be reviewed to make human rights a reality for all Cubans”, concluded Susan Lee.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/cuba-urged-immediately-release-all-prisoners-conscience-2010-07-08