Laura Pollán Toledo, 1948–2011

The woman who flummoxed the Castro regime

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.

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