On the blog Desde La Habana, Tania Quintero pays tribute (in Spanish) to Caridad Caballero and other unrenowned yet courageous and ballsy women of the Cuban opposition. Although none of them have achieved the fame or acquired the following of other Cuban women in the movement, their valiant acts of protest against a brutal and repressive regime put them a cut above the rest.
Here are a couple of excerpts I translated for your reading pleasure:
And we forget that in Cuba, fortunately, there are women willing to take up arms and whose ovaries are worth more than a few pairs of testicles. Cuban women who live day to day are very different from the “celebrities,” and they cannot afford the luxury of a nervous breakdown. They do not have the time to be Tweeting, or granting interviews and meeting with foreign visitors.
Not only are they members of the opposition, independent journalist, or human rights activists, they are also wives, mothers, and daughters. And on their shoulders fall multiple family and domestic problems, like any other lady of the house, whether they are sympathetic or not to the revolution of the Castro brothers.
Almost all of them live in cities and villages in the interior. And the further they are from the capital, the more ballsy they are. Most have to travel on dirt roads, walk up and down hills, cross rivers, cook with charcoal or firewood, and wash their clothes by hand in a bucket in their backyard.
[…]
Cuba is not Havana. And two or three “celebrities” do not represent the women who on the island today fight a hand to hand battle against repression.
H/T Zoé Valdés