U.S.-backed apartheid regime detains and blocks Ladies in White and dissidents in Cuba from attending New Year church services

Berta Soler and Angel Moya
Berta Soler and Angel Moya

2016 ended as it started in Cuba with brutal repression and violent arrests of peaceful activists by the U.S.-backed apartheid dictatorship. Emboldened and empowered by Obama’s Cuba policy, the murderous and corrupt Castro regime sees no reason to scale back its violence and has instead increased its brutality to historic levels.

This is what “Hope and Change” looks like in Obama’s apartheid Cuba.

Diario de Cuba has the report (my translation):

Regime blocks Ladies in White and activists from attending the Mass for Peace at the Cathedral

Sources from the internal opposition have informed Diario de Cuba that the regime blocked the Ladies in White and other activists from attending the Mass for Peace at the Havana Cathedral this Friday.

According to Antonio G. Rodiles, one of the coordinators for the Forum for Rights and Liberties (ForoDyL), the leader of the Ladies in White, Berta Soler, and her husband, former prisoner of conscience from the Group of 75, Angel Moya, were arrested upon leaving their home in Alamar.

“Moya called me and said that he and Berta Soler were going to go out, but that they were surrounded,” said Rodiles.

Diario de Cuba attempted to call Soler and Moya as well as other Ladies in White, but their cellular phones were either turned off or without service.

Earlier in the day, Moya had posted on Twitter that his home in Alamar was under surveillance and that various Ladies in White were “under seige” in their homes and had been warned they were not allowed to leave.

Soler and Moya “have been arrested,” said independent journalist Yuri Valle Roca, another dissident who was “under surveillance” along with his wife, Eralidis Frometa Polanco, a Lady in White.

The leader of the Ladies in White and the former political prisoner were eventually released hours later according to a post on Twitter.

Continue reading (in Spanish) HERE.