Over 200 activists and Ladies in White arrested in Havana and Oriente for participating. DDC. (translation Babalu Blog)+ video UNPACU.
29-02-2016
Over 200 activists and Ladies in White arrested in Havana and Oriente for participating in #TodosMarchamos Campaign Diario de Cuba - Capitol Hill Cubans Translation courtesy of Babalu Blog. February 29, 2016
UNPACU activists in Palma Soriano and Santiago de Cuba in early morning march for the #TodosMarchamos Campaign on February 28, 2016
Sources from the dissident movement report that more than 200 activists were arrested in Havana and the Oriente province this Sunday for participating in the #TodosMarchamos campaign.
Aliuska Gomez, a member of the National Executive for The Ladies in White, told Diario de Cuba that 29 of members of the all-woman group in addition to 32 other activists were “violently arrested.”
She also went on to say that another seven women and about 20 other dissidents were intercepted by State Security agents before they were able to arrive in Santa Rita, the church where The Ladies in White attended services every Sunday.
In the eastern part of the country, the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) tallied at least 121 arrests of #TodosMarchamos participants, a campaign that takes to the streets every Sunday calling for amnesty for political prisoners.
Describing the repression in Havana by the mobs routinely organized by the regime, Aliuska Gomez said: “We were violently arrested by the police, by agents of State Security.”
“The Ladies in White, we all sat down on the floor and chanted ‘Liberty for political prisoners'” she said.
“We were forcibly picked up off the floor and carried into patrol cars and buses to take us to Tarara. At one moment they let me go and I fell to the floor, hitting the ground with my head. Many of us were beaten,” she explained.
She also said she witnessed that various of the men “were being held in a headlock and they threw them into the vehicles like they were throwing them into a cage.”
Gomez said she was put into a patrol car. She added that it was at that moment when she noticed the leader of the women’s group Berta Soler, along with Mailen Gonzalez, “on the floor, surrounded by the police.”
This Sunday is the 43rd Sunday of repression against #TodosMarchamos, an initiative by the Forum for Rights and Liberties that continues to have dissident organizations joining the campaign.
Other reports indicate that 19 Ladies in White were able attend church services in Holguin but seven others were arrested on their way to the church.
In Matanzas, another 43 women were able to carry out their Sunday march under strong surveillance and another 10 did the same in Colon.
According to former political prisoner Ivan Hernandez Carrillo, at least three Ladies in White and another dozen dissident members of the Citizen Movement for Reflection and Reconciliation were arrested in Aguada de Pasajeros, Cienfuegos.