Laura Pollán Toledo, 1948–2011

Laura Pollán Toledo was “a simple wife,” she once said, until she came home one day in March 2003 to see Cuban police taking away her husband, journalist Héctor Maseda. He was rounded up with 74 other critics of the Castro regime and tossed into prison in what was known as “the Black Spring.” In response she founded the “Ladies in White” and become one of Cuba’s most public dissidents.

Shunted between government offices while trying to figure out her husband’s fate, the high school Spanish teacher kept running into other women in the same plight, said The Washington Post. Pollán quickly organized a simple protest movement. The next Sunday, the women dressed in white, gathered after Mass at Havana’s Church of St. Rita, and marched through the capital’s Miramar neighborhood, each carrying a white gladiolus. They have done the same thing every Sunday for eight years, even when tornadoes struck Havana.

The government sent out “harassing mobs in what are known in Cuba as ‘acts of repudiation,’” said Reuters. That didn’t stop the Ladies in White, and eventually the Catholic Church interceded in their defense. The European Union awarded the group the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2005.

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After the last of the 75 Black Spring dissidents, including Pollán’s husband, were released from prison last year, the movement “lost much of its vigor,” said the Financial Times. The Ladies in White have vowed to continue their weekly protests, but Pollán’s death “is a blow to the Ladies, and indeed Cuba’s broader dissident movement.”