Spanish
Havana.- Cuban dissident Aymara Nieto, a member of the Damas de Blanco movement and who had been in prison since 2018, left the island to settle in the Dominican Republic, the NGO Cuba Decide confirmed this Tuesday on social media.
According to the opponent's account, State Security - the Cuban domestic intelligence service - gave her the option of leaving prison, but under the condition of also leaving the island, a common practice that other opponents have adhered to in the past and in which third countries often mediate. The dissident, who was serving her second consecutive sentence in a Havana prison, landed in Santo Domingo this Monday, where she traveled accompanied by her husband, the also opposition figure Ismael Boris Reñí, and two of her daughters. "I was held until the last moment I was at the airport. They (the agents) were the ones who took me. They never let me go home," Nieto said in a video call with Rosa María Payá, founder of Cuba Decide and a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Cuba Decide celebrated the release of Nieto "after seven years of unjust imprisonment and torture." It was not disclosed whether Nieto had completely served his sentence. In that same vein, Johanna Cilano, regional researcher for Amnesty International, stated that the activist's freedom "came at a high cost, forced exile and family separation." He added that "forced exile is a repressive pattern systematically used by the Cuban regime against people imprisoned for political reasons". Nieto was one of the three members of the Damas de Blanco collective who remained behind bars. The Ladies in White movement arose at the initiative of a group of women, relatives of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists arrested and sentenced in March 2003 to lengthy prison sentences during the period of repression known as the Black Spring.You can read: Leaders of Operation Discovery 3.0 in Santiago Interrogated
From then on, the wives, mothers, and other relatives of those prisoners were identified by always wearing white, and after attending mass in a Catholic church, they began to hold Sunday marches to demand their release and became a symbol of dissent. In 2005, the Ladies in White received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.
