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| Sissi Abascal Zamora sentenced to six years in prison for 11J protest |
On International Women Human Rights Defenders Day it is important to recall the role Cuban women played in the resistance to the dictatorship in Cuba, and the high price paid.
During the 11J protests it is known that at least 195 Cuban women were arbitrarily detained, of which at least 67 remain jailed in Cuba today, according to Cubalex. Women have led during these and prior protests and paid a terrible price for their dissent.
Lady in White Sissi Abascal Zamora was sentenced to six years in prison
for participating in the 11J protests in the town of Carlos Rojas, in
the municipality of Jovellanos, in the province of Matanzas.
The 23-year-old activist and member of the Party for Democracy Pedro Luis Boitel has ten business days to appeal. Reports
are that a bus full of women dressed as civilians arrived where Sissi
was peacefully demonstrating with others on July 11, 2021, and proceeded
to beat her and others up, and a bottle was broken over Ms. Abascal
Zamora's head requiring that she receive stitches.
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| Lady in White Sissi Abascal Zamora |
Dr.
Oscar Elias Biscet, a former prisoner of conscience, nonviolence
practitioner, and human rights defender, published an OpEd in The Washington Times
that is a must read. In it he also described the price that Cuban women
are paying for standing up for freedom and their loved ones.
I met a woman who, after learning that her son had been jailed for participating in the protests, walked to the police station to demand his release. She was immediately interrogated and strip-searched, exposing a shirt with the pro-freedom slogan “no more hunger.” The police tore off her shirt, handcuffed and beat her, then forced her to walk almost naked in front of the other officers. “They beat me mercilessly,” she told me. “So many blows that I wet myself.”
Women
have paid a high price for defending human rights in Cuba over several
decades. Here is a sampling of some cases over the past 30 years.
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Sirley Ávila León |
Sirley Ávila León was a delegate to the Municipal Assembly of People’s
Power in Cuba from June 2005, for the rural area of Limones until 2012
when the regime gerrymandered her district out of existence. The Castro
regime removed her from her position because she had fought to reopen a
school in her district, but was ignored by official channels and had
reached out to international media. Her son, Yoerlis Peña Ávila, who had
an 18 year distinguished career in the Cuban military was forced out
when he refused to declare his mother insane and have her committed to a
psychiatric facility.
Sirley joined the ranks of the democratic
opposition, and repression against her increased dramatically. On May
24, 2015 she was the victim of a brutal machete attack carried out by
Osmany Carriòn, with the complicit assistance of his wife, that led to
the loss of her left hand, right upper arm nearly severed, and knees
slashed into leaving her crippled.
Following the attack she did not receive adequate medical care and was told quietly by medical doctors in Cuba that if she wanted to get better that she would need to leave the country.
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| Injuries suffered by Sirley Ávila León. |
On March 8, 2016 she arrived in Miami and began a course of treatments over the next six months during which she was able to walk once again although still limited due to her injuries. She returned to Cuba on September 7, 2016 only to find her home occupied by strangers and her attacker free and bragging that he would finish the job. She moved in with her mother and within a short time a camera and microphone were set up across from her mother's home on a post. The Victims of Communism interviewed her and produced the video above.
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| Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera |
On September 20, 2013 human rights defender Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera briefly described the abuse she had been subjected to
by agents of Cuban state security earlier that same year to the 24th
Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva:
I have been the victim of several acts of aggression on the part of the Cuban authorities, especially by the agents Yuniel Monteagudo Reina and Eric Aquino Yera. They have beaten me into unconsciousness on the pavement, as took place most recently this past March 7 in Santa Clara. The hits to the head, neck, and back have caused me serious health problems that I have not been able to recover from. In addition to beating me, they have threatened me with death on various occasions, these agents have told me that they are going to rape me, and have shown their genitals during arbitrary arrests.
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| Yris Pérez Aguilera shows cyst, result of state security beatings. (Photo: Yoani Sanchez). |
Cuban attorneys Yaremis Flores and Laritza Diversent in their 2013 report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) touched on the institutional nature of the violence upon women in Cuba by the Castro regime:
Due to increasing repression, human rights lawyer, Laritza Diversent
was granted political asylum and went into exile on May 4, 2017. She
continues to receive threats to the present day from the Cuban
government.
"The brutality of the police and state security agents, including women members of these bodies, against women dissidents, is supported by the state, which exemplifies the institutionalized violence as a means to repress women opposition activists. Arbitrary detention is one of the methods to prevent them from exercising their rights to speak, associate and demonstrate. In detention centers agents use violence, sexual assault and insults as means of repression. The cells enclosed in unsanitary and sometimes sanitary services have no privacy or are not appropriate for women, even having them share prison cells with men. In some cases, they forced to strip naked or forcibly stripped, obliging them to squat to see if they have items in their genitals and claims that have been reported that they have introduced a pen into the vagina, under the justification of seeking recording objects."
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| Yaremis Flores and Laritza Diversent |
Laura Inés Pollán Toledo, one of the founders of the Ladies in White in March of 2003 and its chief spokesperson, was widely admired inside of
Cuba and internationally.
Laura Pollán, a courageous woman spoke truth to power and
protested in the streets of Cuba demanding an amnesty for Cuban
political prisoners. She had been a school teacher,
before her husband was jailed for his independent journalism in 2003
along with more than 75 other civil society members.
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| Laura Pollán |
Following brutal repression, in an effort to prevent them from marching
through the streets of Havana, Laura Pollán directly and nonviolently challenged the regime declaring, "we will never give up our protest. The authorities have three options — free our husbands, imprison us or kill us."
She fell suddenly ill and died within a week on October 14, 2011 under suspicious circumstances that a Cuban medical doctor described as "painful, tragic and unnecessary." This took place within days of the Ladies in White declaring themselves a human rights organization dedicated to the freedom of all political prisoners, not just their loved ones.
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| Mariela Elena Cruz Varela |
On November 19, 1991 the Cuban poet Mariela Elena Cruz Varela, who peacefully dissented asking for nonviolent change, was assaulted by a mob organized by the dictatorship who tried to force feed the poet her own words. She wrote about the assault in her book,
Dios en las cárceles cubanas (God in the Cuban jails):
"They broke my mouth trying to make me swallow the leaflets that members of my group had distributed throughout Havana. Afterwards I spent three days brutally besieged, imprisoned in my own home with my two children, with no water, no electricity, no food, no cigarettes. We heard what the huge speakers never stopped amplifying, allegorical songs to the country, the necessary punishment of traitors, and anyone who wanted to could shout at me, organized, of course, the slogans they pleased: Comrade worm, we are going to execute you by firing squad!"Cuban women continue to lead the struggle for human rights and freedom in Cuba and on International Women Human Rights Defenders Day we honor them.
