4/20/14, "Easter No. 3 for a Prisoner of Castro," Wall St. Journal, Mary Anastasia O'Grady, "Bearing witness to Cuba's political persecution costs Sonia Garro her freedom."
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| Sonia Garro |
"Christians the world over celebrated the
resurrection of their savior on Sunday with worship services and family
gatherings. Thirty-eight-year-old
Sonia Garro
shares the faith too, but she spent the holiday in a Cuban
dungeon as a prisoner of conscience, just as she has for the past two
years.
Ms. Garro is a member of the
Christian dissident group Ladies in White, started in Havana in 2003 by
sisters, wives and mothers of political prisoners to peacefully protest
the unjust incarceration of their loved ones. It has since expanded to
other parts of the country and added many recruits. The group's growing
popularity has worried the
Castros,
and they have responded with increasing brutality.
Cuba's
military government wants us to believe that the Brothers Fidel and
Raul Castro
are "reforming." To buy that line you have to pretend that Ms.
Garro and her sisters in Christ don't exist. Of course that's often the
impression one gets from Havana-based reporters working for foreign
media outlets.
They've been invited
into the country not to serve the truth but to serve the dictatorship.
Fortunately, there are brave and independent Cuban journalists who
continue to tell the Ladies' story, despite scant resources.
In the late winter of 2012, Cubans were looking forward to a visit from
Pope Benedict XVI
and the Ladies were lobbying the Vatican for an audience. Their
relentless pleading was embarrassing the dictatorship, which had been
beating them in the streets on their way to Sunday Mass for almost a
decade. It was also making the Church, which had already cut its own
deal with the regime on the terms of the visit, look bad. On the weekend
of March 17 Castro sent the Ladies a warning by locking up some 70 of
their members.
Most of those detained,
including leader
Berta Soler,
had been freed by the time the pontiff touched down in Cuba nine
days later, but Ms. Garro was not. Benedict celebrated some Masses, did
photo ops with the despots and left.
It
was a clever strategy: The world saw the release of the many Ladies,
which obscured the continued detention of the one. That one—poor, black
and not well known internationally—serves, to this day, as a constant
reminder of the wrath Castro will bring down on anyone in the barrios
who gets out of line.
By 2012 Ms. Garro
already had experience with state violence. Her record of
counterrevolutionary activities included running a recreation center in
her home for troubled youths. For that she was twice beaten by government-sanctioned mobs. She suffered a broken nose in police detention in 2010.
When security agents took her home to
put her under house arrest ahead of the pope's visit, she was met by a
mob sent to harass her. Her husband,
Ramon Alejandro Muñoz,
had climbed to the roof and was chanting anti-dictatorship
slogans. Two neighbors took the couple's side. Special-forces police
were called in. They raided the home, shot Ms. Garro in the leg with
rubber bullets and hauled the couple and two neighbors to jail.
The
prosecution is seeking a 10-year prison sentence for Ms. Garro, 14 years
for Mr. Muñoz, and 11 years for Mr. Hernández.
Anyone
who has ever read about Soviet show trials will recognize the state's
case. The prosecutors claim that Messrs. Muñoz and Hernández were both
on the roof and knew a police officer could have been killed when they
threw things to try to stop him from climbing a ladder to reach them.
The
regime alleges that the couple had been planning street disturbances.
The "evidence" confiscated from their home included bottles, machetes,
rebar and cardboard protest signs. The state claims that containers with
fuel found in the home were Molotov cocktails.
Every
household item or piece of scrap found in a poor Cuban household is
considered a weapon when the state wants to convict a prisoner. By its
logic the frying pan and the iron should have been cited too. With good
aim, they can be deadly. As to the combustibles inside the home, Ms.
Garro's sister Yamilet Garro told independent journalist
Augusto Cesar
San Martín Albistur, "the items were for lighting during the
blackouts that are quite common in the area." For Castro, the most
dangerous items were the antigovernment signs.
Ms.
Garro's real crime is her refusal to surrender her soul to the state.
That makes her an exemplary Christian but a lousy revolutionary. The
peril she presents is showing Cubans how to be both."
Image: "Sonia Garro, a 38-year-old mother and a member of the dissident group
Ladies in White, just spent her third Easter as a prisoner of conscience
in one of Castro's dungeons." getty
.
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