Las Damas Blancas

A little background history so that everyone gets the context of the Damas Blancas.  In the spring of 2002, there was a protest against the Castro regime.  It included close to 75 professors, lawyers, writers, artists, a lot of intellectuals. Well Castro did NOT like it, and threw all of them in jail. A lot of them were the breadwinners for their families, and it caused a big vacuum in Havana society. The people here call it “Primavera Negra”, or Black Spring.

            Now getting to the Damas Blancas. These women are based out of a church called Santa Rita, which is very close to where we live.  Twenty or so blocks away, about a twenty-five minute walk.  These are all kinds of women, from all walks of life who know the story behind the unreasonable detention of these intellectuals and have decided to lodge a continuous peaceful protest since that point.  Every Sunday these women come out of Santa Rita with a single white flower for each of the detainees and shout “¡Libertad, Libertad!”  During the rest of the week they wear all white as they go about their daily lives.  This has been going on for the nine years since Castro put the intellectuals in jail.

            About a year ago, El Presidente decided that he was going to put a stop to this and that these women were causing too much trouble.  So, one Sunday in the middle of spring, Father Jose Felix gave his mass and then the service dismissed.  These women exited the church to be confronted with a horde of Castro’s thugs.  None of them were police and none of them said that they were from the government but they kept the women blockaded for over two hours.  Lots of threats were yelled, they were called whores, none of them were allowed to leave and all sorts of awful things happened.  Well eventually, one passed out and an ambulance had to be called.

            The police finally showed up after the ambulance had been called and the horde went scrambling but the trials were not over for the Damas Blancas.  They were told that they were the cause of the incident and they were pushed and beaten into trucks by the police and taken to their homes and put under house arrest.

            The next Sunday, the Cardinal of Havana, the most high-ranking figure in the Catholic Church in Cuba came to Santa Rita and gave the sermon.  After he was finished, he made a public promise to all that were in the congregation that nothing like what had happened the previous week would ever happen again.  In this country, that is like throwing down the gauntlet and asking Castro to pick it up.  Miraculously though, whether it was due to pressure from the public, the Vatican, or just his own whims, Castro began to release the prisoners and let all of the Damas Blancas off of house arrest.  Not all of the prisoners have been released, but it is a slow process to readmit known dissenters back into the general population of a communist country. 

            This is the project that I am working on all semester, so I will give more updates soon!