Havana Cuba. — For three days in March 2003, terror gripped the country. The arrest of several dozen opponents and independent journalists, in the midst of spectacular police operations, shocked Cuban cities in all provinces. The curious stayed away from the uniformed… just in case.
The detainees were sent to the dungeons, without windows, light or water, of the State Security headquarters. The uncertainty regarding the next step was the most important card of the dictatorship in the face of the growth of the democratic opposition.
How to bear the pain of unjust imprisonment without surrendering to the oppressor? Would José Martí, who was sentenced to political prison at the age of 17, the same age as many of the young men imprisoned for the July 11 rebellion, ask himself? The inspiring response of the Apostle was carved in marble:
“Look at me, mother, and for your love do not cry
If slave of my age and my doctrines
I filled your martyred heart with thorns.
Think that they are born among thorns, flowers.”
For the apostle of our freedom, love for his mother Leonor Pérez was shield and sword.
No one narrates those days of pain and fear in March 2003 like Yolanda Huerga, the wife of the poet Manuel Vázquez Portal. In those fateful moments, Yolanda Huerga knew that her life would no longer be the same.
“When on March 19, 2003, between 5:30 and 5:45 in the afternoon, I opened the door of my house to the political police, I knew that my family was going to be cut off and my 9-year-old son condemned to suffer harassment”, says Yolanda.
Most of the prisoners had as their main crime being poets, writers, journalists and owning an old typewriter or a dilapidated camera.
There was a handbook of stories narrated in the first person about those sad and at the same time luminous days in which manliness and love, filial and partner, rose above the repressive storm.
José Daniel Ferrer, together with his brother, in Palmarito de Cauto, was the insurgent voice of eastern Cuba. That patriotic and irredeemable voice was amplified by Belkis Cantillo, the wife of José Daniel. She resisted the harassment, the repudiation rallies and the humiliation attempts during the visit to the prisons where her husband was.
It was the manzanillera Laura Pollan, teacher by profession and wife of Héctor Maceda, one of the imprisoned journalists, who best embodies the metamorphosis of simple and hard-working women who, by the work and grace of government evil, became heroines. Because, denying a certain playwright, no one is born a hero, circumstances and the attitude they have when facing them make them a hero.
Laura Pollán, Bertha Soler, Blanca Reyes, Miriam Leiva, Gisela Delgado, Magaly Broche, Sonia Álvarez (wives of Héctor Maceda, Ángel Moya, Raúl Rivero, Oscar Espinosa Chepe, Héctor Palacios, Librado Linares, Félix Navarro, in that order), among others, formed the movement ladies in whitea group of women who, with their Sunday marches through the streets, brought tyranny to its knees, no matter how much the Catholic Church wants to take credit for the liberation of the 75.
The Ladies in White resisted like lionesses the onslaught of the mobs… in their homes, in the streets, in their workplaces and studies. There was a Sunday when they endured a repudiation rally for seven hours in the middle of a park, surrounded by a mob of criminals at the service of the dictatorship, who shouted insults and obscenities at them and prevented them from leaving the place.
Glory to those women. To mothers like Concepción Carrillo (that of Iván Hernández Carrillo), to daughters like Saily Navarro (that of Félix Navarro). Wives like those already mentioned and others that would make the text endless, just for love, resisted the onslaught of hatred and infamy.
From those days of horror and glory, love, effort, resistance, hope remained.
OPINION ARTICLE
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