Black Spring of Cuba

The spring of 2003 is known as The Black Spring of Cuba, when in a wave of unprecedented repression, the Castro regime put in jail 75 peaceful opponents. Many of them are still prisoners.

These prisoners worked and expressed themselves peacefully to defend freedom, human rights and democracy in their country. Doctors, teachers or journalists were arrested and subjected in few days to summary trials, where they were condemned to long sentences from 15 to 28 years in prison.

According to the Castro dictatorship these people were "threatening national security" by disseminating ideas against the Communist system.

The international public opinion claimed after this repressive action. The European Union, the Pope, organizations which defend human rights, as Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders and Amnesty International (which declared these people prisoners of conscience), intellectuals and artists condemned these arrests.

Everything indicates that the Cuban regime did that as an answer to the growth of the opposition groups in Cuba. Independent journalists were heard inside and outside the island; one example was the independent magazine De Cuba, launched by Raul Rivero and Ricardo Gonzalez. Also, in that time the Sakharov Prize, Oswaldo Paya, carried out the Varela Project, the most successful initiative of the opposition that get more than 10,000 signatures on May 2002, in support of a referendum for democratic reforms in Cuba.

Five years later, still 55 prisoners from the Black Spring of Cuba remain in prison, in subhuman conditions and with serious health problems as a result of their stay in prison. Their relatives, the Ladies in White, go on asking for their freedom and for the freedom of all the Cuban political prisoners.