In Cuba, people have gone to prison for speaking out. Mariane Pearl travels there and finds that the country’s boldest activists are women—and they make their point without saying a word.

The silent march of the Ladies in White
On a bright Sunday morning in Havana, I watched as more than a dozen women dressed in white, each carrying a pink gladiolus, marched along Fifth Avenue, an elegant street lined with neatly trimmed shrubbery and mansions painted in faded pastels. It was a highly unusual occurrence in communist Cuba: a political protest, albeit a quiet one. There were no slogans to be heard, no signs to be read. The women said nothing, but their silence contained a significant cry for freedom.

They are known as the Ladies in White—the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of 75 political prisoners jailed in 2003 by Fidel Castro. The women were demanding the release of these men from prison. You could say they were staring down a dictator.

I visited Cuba in June—on the second stop in my journey around the world just weeks before Castro fell ill and threw the future of his regime into doubt. The protest I witnessed offered a poignant snapshot of a Cuba closing in on a half-century of life under communist rule. Ever since Castro came to power in the fifties, Cubans had grown used to waiting for things—waiting in line to collect rationed food, waiting to be reunited with loved ones who fled an oppressive regime, waiting for the embargo imposed by the United States to end. Waiting for history to turn this seemingly endless page and move on. In that atmosphere, the Ladies in White represent the rarest of breeds—Cubans who found a way to say, publicly: enough waiting.

The men they hoped to free were arrested for being peaceful activists for democracy and human rights, according to their relatives. Some were sentenced to up to 28 years. The government claimed the men were dissidents whose actions undermined the Cuban regime. For three years, the Ladies in White have marched on their behalf, almost every Sunday after mass at the church of Saint Rita, the Roman Catholic patron saint of lost causes. And they were still marching as of press time, despite the political uncertainty in the country. Their gatherings have come to embody the frustration of a people longing for freedom.

It felt odd yet reassuring to be back in Cuba on this trip. I have family in Havana, and I have been visiting this island since I was a child. My mother was born in Cuba, and she left in 1965. It seemed that little had changed since then. People were warm and friendly, quick to have a drink, dance and share jokes as if there were no tomorrows to worry about, or simply no change in sight under Castro’s rule.

After watching the women march, I went to meet Laura Pollan, 54, a Lady in White who is a teacher of Spanish literature, at her home. On my way, I saw Dodges and Chryslers from the sixties, their paint sun-bleached to pale blue and dusty red, and passed billboards bearing slogans like “The Nation or Death” and “Capitalists, You Don’t Scare Us.”