The Ladies in White Founders: A look back to their first gathering 20 years ago today

 What's past is prologue. = William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I.

Claudia Márquez Linares (left), Blanca Reyes Castañón (center) and Miriam Leiva (right).

The Ladies in White were founded by Claudia Márquez Linares, Blanca Reyes Castañón, Dolia Leal Francisco, Miriam Leiva Viamonte, Gisela Delgado Sablón, Yolanda Huerga Cedeño, Marcela Sánchez Santa Cruz, and Berta de los Angeles Soler Fernandez, whose husbands were imprisoned in March 2003.

 On March 30, 2003, this group of women, later known as the Ladies in White, visited the Santa Rita Church in Havana, Cuba for the first time.

Claudia Márquez Linares, was then leading the Sociedad de Periodistas Independientes "Manuel Márquez Sterling" ("Manuel Márquez Sterling" Society of Independent Journalists.)  Her husband was opposition leader Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés.  Osvaldo, led the Partido Liberal Democrático de Cuba (Liberal Democratic Party of Cuba), and was sentenced to 18 years in prison following the March 2003 crackdown. 

Blanca Reyes Castañón, one of the founders of the movement and wife of the prestigious writer, poet and journalist, now deceased, Raúl Rivero, sentenced to 20 years in prison, declared to The New York Times in 2003: ''This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks,'' said Mr. Rivero's wife, Blanca Reyes. ''What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade.''

Dolia Leal Francisco is the wife of Nelson Aguiar, sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2003. At the time of his arrest Aguiar was president of the Cuban Orthodox Party. "Before her husband was sentenced to 13 years in prison, Dolia Leal Francisco had little contact with the other wives of Cuba's dissidents.
Today, they are like a surrogate family to her, a sort of sisterhood bound by shared summary trials", reported the Havana Bureau of the South Florida Sun Sentinel on May 4, 2003. 

Miriam Leiva Viamonte was a Cuban diplomat, translator and English professor who was expelled from her job at the Ministry of Foreign Relations after working their for 20 years in September 1992 for "loss of political confidence" because she had refused to conspire against her husband on their behalf, who they had accused of being a "counter-revolutionary subject." She became a human rights defender in 1995, and independent journalist in 1996. Her husband Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an economist, was arrested in the March 2003 crackdown and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Gisela Delgado Sablón is the wife of Héctor Palacios Ruiz, who was arrested in the March 2003 crackdown and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Héctor Palacio, was president of the Partido Solidaridad Democrático (PSD), Democratic Solidarity Party, and had been a member of the national coordinating council of Concilio Cubano, Cuban Concilium in the late 1990s. 

 

 

Yolanda Huerga Cedeño is the wife of Manuel Vázquez Portal. On April 4, 2004, Manuel Vázquez was "sentenced to 18 years in prison for "endangering Cuba's independence" through his articles and his meetings with US officials."

Marcela Sánchez Santa Cruz Pacheco is the sister of human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez Santacruz.

Berta de los Angeles Soler Fernandez studied microbiology and became a hospital technician in Havana. In 1988, Berta married Angel Moya Acosta, an opposition activist who became one of 75 nonviolent dissidents arrested during the March 2003 crackdown. Her activism began after Cuban authorities jailed her husband in 2003, and sentenced him to 20 years in prison.  In October 2004, the Ladies in White staged protests in front of the Communist Party’s headquarters in Revolution Square, pressuring the government to allow Berta’s husband to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. The protest went on for two days until the regime permitted Angel’s operation.