Ladies in White

Ladies in White (Spanish: Damas de Blanco) is an opposition movement in Cuba founded in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents and those who have been made to disappear by the government.

[3] In the view of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Black Spring violated the most basic norms of international law, including Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees everyone the right to "seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of their choice.

The white clothing they wear is reminiscent of the Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who used a similar strategy to demand information about their missing children from the 1970s military junta.

At times, rather large mobs have attacked these Ladies in White, yelling insults and slurs at them, and assisting the police to throw them into imprisonment buses.

[10] In 2005, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought was awarded jointly to Reporters without Borders, Nigerian human rights lawyer Huawa Ibrahim, and the Ladies in White.

[19] On 13 January 2012, US Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Díaz-Balart, Albio Sires, and David Rivera issued a bipartisan statement urging the prisoners' release, calling their detention "appalling and unjust".

[20] US Senators Marco Rubio and Robert Menendez also issued a statement calling for their release and condemning the "unrelenting tyranny" of "the Castro brothers".

[23] Roughly seventy members of the Ladies in White were detained on the weekend of 16–17 March 2012, including Berta Soler, the group's current leader.

[8] On 21 March, Amnesty International designated imprisoned Ladies in White member Yasmin Conyedo Riveron and her husband Yusmani Rafael Alvarez Esmori as prisoners of conscience.

Some members believed Cuban authorities would allow them to protest without getting arrested due to the presence of international reporters and a foreign head of state.

Soler offered the following thoughts prior to being arrested: "For us, it's very important that we do this so President Obama knows that there are women here fighting for the liberty of political prisoners.