9.08.2015 .
Havana, Cuba
Today, there were 4 different occurrences during the Sunday Ladies in White March:
. I was able to tell the State Security agent, Javier (who came personally to remove me from the march) that he could no longer deny the repression and the blows that the Ladies in White are given, or to those that peacefully accompany them. It was the most violent Sunday that I have witnessed.
. The uniformed “foreign and immigration police” was also present since there were some curious foreigners in attendance and it seems they were also apprehended.
. After the buses in which they carted away the Ladies in White had left, I saw a young man, alone, sobbing at the entrance to a building. A group of people (some of which had just been victims of repression) approached him to calm him down and to “explain, justify” what he had just witnessed: REPRESSION.
. One of the women that just a little while ago had been yelling “Viva Fidel!”, passed us by (Lia Villares and myself) and at that moment in which she found herself alone, did not have the courage to look at us directly, nor yell at us nor defend her principles.
I saw how 4 men jostled a dissident and threw him to the ground grabbing his neck. How they pushed another man against a fence. How they subdued another with a strangle hold in order to cart him out (at that moment Berta Soler [from the Ladies in White] and I went over to intervene in the face of so much violence) the “inflammed mob” (because that is not the Cuban People) tried to cajole and provoke them in spite pf the Ladies in White offering no resistance. They would yell at us offenses and told us to get out of the country.
There was so much violence (be it by the amount of people per dissident, by the impunity of their actions, etc. ) with so much terror, that there was an irony: those screams of “Viva Cuba and the USA, were those that a few months back were yelling ” Down with the Imperialist Yankees” , and referring to the presidents of the USA with such lack if respect that, if they would have been talking about a Cuban president they would have been charged with “contempt of court”.
This is no way to get anywhere; it is the responsibility of the Cuban government to break up those mobs that they give license to, to hit to send offend. It is the responsibility of this government anything that happens these Sundays, and it is the responsibility of this government for the intolerance towards anyone that thinks differently
Today, more than ever I am sure that we need a law against “political hate” that authorizes political demonstration and allows freedom of expression.