On March 20, 2003, a group of courageous Cuban women, all relatives of political prisoners, formed an opposition group on the island that to this day continues to challenge and stand up to the communist dictatorship.
Via Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter:
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.
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.
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