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Pro-Castro Mob Beats, Bites, Insults Ladies in White

September 29th, 2011 , By admin

Find Under Focus on Cuba

HAVANA – In late September, an organized pro-government mob of around 300 people, along with State Security agents with loudspeakers that resonated speeches by Fidel Castro, and who were screaming slogans, insults, obscenities, and carrying flags and posters, surrounded the home of one of the representatives of the peaceful human rights group of women known as the “Ladies in White”.

Some 35 women from numerous provinces were gathered at the Havana home of Laura Pollán to make their usual once-a-year pilgrimage by foot to attend mass at the Church of Our Lady of Mercy, patron saint of prisoners. The women were brutally assaulted by plainclothes State Security agents when they tried to leave the house. The mob pounced on them, hitting, twisting their arms, and even biting the women.

Pollan said her home had been monitored since the previous day and she didn’t know why her group was not allowed to march as they have on September 24 in past years. She accused the government of coordinating the act of repudiation.

“These are people who are brought in because they’re always the same ones,” Pollan said.

The pro-Castro mob kept screaming “they will not go through” (no pasarán) and “machete, they are only a few” (machete que son poquitas), implying that the women would never get through the crowd, and that, because the women were only a few, they were easy prey, implying brutal violence, at the hands of the mob.

The Ladies in White, who formed to press for the release of their political prisoner husbands, intellectuals, and social commentators jailed in a 2003 crackdown, historically have marched to commemorate the day of the Virgin of Mercedes, the patron saint of prisoners.

Their loved ones were freed over the past year under a deal brokered by the Roman Catholic Church, but the Ladies say they intend to keep protesting for greater freedom. They have refocused their agenda by demanding freedom for some 50 prisoners convicted of politically motivated crimes.

Two supporters of the Ladies in White were taken off the bus they were riding by State Security agents, who took their personal documents to prevent them from continuing their journey on to Havana from Eastern Cuba. Two other of the Ladies disguised themselves as beggars to reach the house of Ms. Pollan.  Throughout Cuba, there were activists, including Ladies in White, who were threatened and kept under house arrest to prevent their attending the mass at the church. Numerous human rights activists also suffered short term arrests the same day, including: human rights defenders Aimee Garces and Tania Montoya, who were detained as they left Ms. Pollan’s home to make their return trip back to their homes in Eastern Cuba and released after authorities took away all their money. In Havana, activist Eriberto Liranza, leader of the Cuban Youth Movement for Democracy, was arrested, beaten and released, and so were Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez and his wife Yris Tamara Perez Aguilera. Manuel Cuesta Morua was detained and prevented from attending an independent cultural event in Havana and released a few hours later.

CFTU Updates

  • The Passing of Bill Doherty

    Bill Doherty, 84, Executive Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO

    William Charles “Bill” Doherty Jr., who led the AFL-CIO’s outreach to trade unions in Latin America for 35 years, died August 28 after a long battle with bone marrow cancer. He was 84.

    Born in Belleview, Ky., the oldest of nine children, Doherty was raised in the Washington, D.C. area where his father, William Charles Doherty Sr. was president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, and later the first U.S. ambassador to Jamaica. He graduated from St. Paul’s Catholic Academy High School, where he met his future wife, Jane Catherine Donovan, a Boston native.  He worked as a Capitol Hill police officer while completing his degree in philosophy at Catholic University of America, where he played defensive lineman for the football team. He also attended Georgetown University School of Linguistics and Georgetown Law School.

    Doherty’s life was defined by his Catholic faith (he spent a brief period of his life in the St. Charles Seminary, studying to be a priest) and his conviction that democratic trade unions held the key to freedom and prosperity around the world. His work with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Postal Telephone and Telegraph International (PTTI) and the AFL-CIO’s American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), took him to 129 countries over his career.

    After serving as an aerial photographer with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, Doherty assisted in rebuilding the trade union movement in Germany, supporting the anti-Nazi, dissident labor leaders and nascent democratic trade union movement that is today known as the Confederation of German Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerteschaftsbund, DGB).  He served in Belgium, Europe and Latin America as an AFL-CIO representative to the PTTI, an international trade secretariat.

    When President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was initiated in 1961 to support labor’s international role in nurturing democratic trade union movements abroad, Doherty was the logical choice to serve as AIFLD’s Director of Social Projects, and later as Executive Director.  He led the AIFLD under the direction of four AFL-CIO presidents, retiring in 1996.

    Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Jane Catherine Donovan, eight children and 25 grandchildren.

  • The CFTU Website

    Welcome to the CFTU website!

    We’ve designed it to keep you better informed about developments in the continuing struggle of workers everywhere to establish and maintain the right of Freedom of Association – the right to form and join unions of their own choosing, run by people they elect.

    The CFTU has been active in recent years in attempts to assist workers in Cuba struggling to assert that right – in the face of their government’s insistence that only one union, guided by the Communist Party, can represent them,  and against the background of continuing imprisonment and harassment of those who think otherwise.

    Cuba is not the only country in the world denying workers their rights.  Sadly the list is long – Burma, Vietnam, North Korea, China -  to cite a few.  But too many trade unionists in the free world are unwilling to speak out, apparently believing that somehow these regimes will transform themselves into democratic societies and that through contact with free world unions, the non-representative unions in those police states will remake themselves into legitimate unions. Such a belief flies in the face of 90 years of experience to the contrary.

    The recent hunger-strike death in a Cuban prison of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a 42-year old brick mason serving a 26-year sentence for his political activities, and the long hunger strike of  dissident journalist Guillermo Farinas, provide eloquent testimony to the determination of those heroes to see their country free and democratic and observant of all the rights of free people.

    Our committee believes that neither dictatorships nor their hand-maiden unions ever yield power willingly and that free trade unions must not be complicit in the denial of freedom of association to workers.  Rather, we believe that those who are joined in the struggle to assert workers’ rights in the face of dictators, those who risk imprisonment and harassment, need and deserve our moral and material support.  We hope you will join us in those struggles.

    Tom Donahue, CFTU Chair