Cuban church official tells Ladies in White they are now political group
Juan O. Tamayo | McClatchy Newspapers | May 25, 2012
MIAMI — A Cuban Catholic Church official told the Ladies in White on Friday they are no longer a humanitarian group and that the government is unlikely to let them go to the Vatican even if Pope Benedict XVI grants them an audience, spokeswoman Berta Soler said.
The lay spokesman for Cardinal Jaime Ortega, meanwhile, told a conference in California that the government must guarantee the rights of the island’s “political, cultural or religious” minorities and dissidents must abandon “verbal violence.”
Soler said Msgr. Ramon Suarez Polcari, chancellor of the Havana archdiocese, “has always been very receptive with us, but not today.”
During the meeting between four Ladies in White and Polcari, she added, “there were tough moments.”
When the women asked for an audience with the pope, Soler said, the monsignor replied that if the government did not allow them to attend the pontiff’s Masses during his visit in March, it was unlikely to allow them to fly to Italy.
Polcari also challenged the purpose of the Ladies in White, founded by women relatives of 75 dissidents arrested in a 2003 crackdown to demand their release. All were freed by last summer, after Ortega interceded on their behalf.
The monsignor “told us that we are a political movement, that we have changed. We told him we are a humanitarian group, a human-rights group,” Soler told the Miami Herald by telephone from Havana.
The women “reminded him why we’re continuing,” gave him a list of about 60 Cubans imprisoned for political motives and the names of the 60 Ladies in White arrested in March for brief periods to keep them from attending the papal Masses.
Participating in the 80-minute meeting were Soler, Magalys Norvis, Odalis Sanabria and Laura Maria Labrada Pollan. Polcari’s title makes him a top administrator for the archdiocese of Havana.
Read more here: www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/05/25/150236/cuban-church-official-tells-ladies.html#storylink=cpy
If the Ladies in White is a political group, so is the USCCCB.