The 60-year-old dissident, who has been arrested almost every Sunday since 2022 for trying to walk to Mass in protest, says she feels that lately “the repression has intensified.”
EFE (via 14ymedio), Madrid, 22 June 2024 — The veteran Cuban dissident Berta Soler is clear when asked why she continues to lead the Ladies in White movement for political prisoners after more than 20 years: “Resistance and conscience,” she says in an interview with EFE.
This 60-year-old Cuban, who has been arrested almost every Sunday since 2022 for trying to walk to mass in protest, says she feels that lately “the repression has intensified.”
“If you are aware of what you do and why you fight, age or illness doesn’t matter or that they put you in a dungeon, because they do this on Sundays to frighten us, so that we get tired, so that we are afraid and give up,” she says.
With that premise she states: “We will continue to take to the streets, doing our job, because if there is awareness, love for what you do, you continue.”
“I chose this path because my people need it, because the prisoners need it,” adds Soler, who intends to continue “until they are all free.”
“We are going to keep taking to the streets, doing our job, because if there is awareness, love for what you do, you continue”
For her, and for all of Cuba, she argues, the anti-government demonstrations of 11 July 2021 (11J), the largest protests in decades, meant a before and an after, and she is convinced that they could be repeated.
According to the NGO Prisoner Defenders, there are currently more than 1,100 political prisoners in Cuba, a designation that Soler defends “because they went out to demonstrate their disagreement with the regime although they didn’t belong to any dissident organization,” and, therefore, “they are political prisoners, not bandits.”
“On 11J the people went out to demand freedom, democracy and rights. The reasons that led these people to take to the streets are present and ar