Cameras captured the moment Cuban state security forces violently arrested Berta Soler, the head of the Ladies in White anti-communist organization, on Sunday as she attempted a lone protest armed with only a gladiola.
Soler’s organization is composed of the wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and other relatives of political prisoners. They have been engaged in peaceful anti-communist resistance for nearly two decades. Their primary form of protest is to assemble on Sundays, march through the streets of their respective cities carrying the photos of their imprisoned loved ones and flowers, and attend Catholic Mass. The Communist Party began coercing churches to ban the Ladies in White from attending Mass in 2015.
Soler attempted to continue the tradition by walking alone on Sunday, carrying a flower and shouting anti-regime slogans. In a video posted to social media by her husband and former political prisoner Angel Moya – whose imprisonment led Soler to join the Ladies in White – Soler can be seen walking down a mostly empty street, raising a gladiola and chanting “down with Díaz-Canel,” a reference to the puppet president currently serving as the face of the Castro regime, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Soler makes it about halfway down the street before two plain-clothed Cuban security officers catch up to her. A larger mob of communists soon follow, some of them carrying a white banner they use to surround and hide her so that the public cannot see her. They take her into custody soon after.
Soler can be heard shouting “down with the dictatorship” while being surrounded and taken away.
The arrest on video was the second that Soler experienced in a week. The Sunday before, Soler was arrest alongside fellow dissident Bárbara Farrat after attempting a similar peaceful march and church attendance, again not making it to any service before being harassed, surrounded, and detained by Cuban regime agents. Prior to the arrest on January 23, Soler announced that the Ladies in White would return to regular weekly protests. While consistently active for years, restrictions the Cuban regime implemented allegedly to contain the Chinese coronavirus had largely stalled the group’s ability to organize assemblies. The Communist Party’s violent crackdowns on dissidents after the July 11 protests, which reportedly attracted nearly 200,000 protesters, also hurt the Ladies in White, as many members also joined in calling for an end to the regime.
“We will continue to maintain our presence [in public] and it is of utmost importance that more people join, so that the repressors understand that families are active for the liberation of their loved ones,” Soler had said in a statement last week directed to the relatives of the political prisoners arrested on July 11. “Your sons and daughters are waiting for you, it is your right to struggle for them. You are their legs, their ears, their eyes, and their voices. Do not allow them to silence you and do not allow [your children] to complete the long sentences imposed on them.”
The Communist Party is currently engaging in the process of putting July 11 protesters through sham trials en masse. Human rights groups have denounced trials lumping as many as 30 people together, in many cases with significantly different facts of each case – including mixing children with adults, spectators with active protesters, and abled people with those whose loved ones say have legitimate mental health problems.
Estimates of the number of people arrested on July 11 range in the thousands, though the secretive nature of the communist regime makes it impossible to know the true number. Cuban Prisoners Defenders, an organization that attempts to track politically motivated arrests and the treatment of dissidents on the island, estimated in December that the increase in anti-government resistance resulted in a 500-percent increase in the number of political prisoners on the island.
“These are a small fraction of the real figures, whose total verification is simply unattainable,” Cuban Prisoners Defenders caveated their report. The group estimated that about 8,000 people were arrested on July 11 alone, not counting police raids, beatings, and disappearances conducted in subsequent days.
Angel Moya Acosta denounced in a post on Facebook that Soler was one of 23 Ladies in White arrested nationwide on Sunday. He said his wife was detained for eight hours without cause and with no notification to her family, rendering her effectively a victim of forced disappearance.
Police arrested Soler again on Tuesday, according to a statement on her Facebook account.
“I was followed on the bus that I was taking by a [government] operative at 11:05 a.m. when I got off at the Calabazar cemetery stop I was intercepted by said operated, prohibiting me from continuing,” Soler wrote. “I was detained in a car with a MININT [Ministry of Intelligence] license plate and freed at 11:50 a.m.”
Police told Soler that she could not leave her home indefinitely. Soler’s post did not specify what authorities believe she did to prompt such restrictions and there is no indication that Cuban authorities have accused her of violating any laws.