Cuban police break up women's sit-in for release of husbands

The 10 women, half of them members of the "Ladies in White" dissident group, gathered early Monday at the park beside Havana's famed Revolution Square.

The demonstration was broken up a little more than three hours later when a bus carrying more than 20 uniformed policewomen arrived. The protesters locked arms and refused requests to leave, prompting officers to pin them to the ground with their arms behind their backs, said Berta de Los Angeles Soler, whose activist husband, Angel Moya, is serving 20 years in prison.

Soler said the women were carried onto the bus and driven home. Seven participants were taken out of the capital to their homes in other provinces.

"They did not hit us. There was no violence," Soler said.

She said the protest started out quietly, but when authorities arrived a mob of mostly female government supporters spilled out of official buildings and shouted obscenities at demonstrators. The protesters responded from the bus with chants of "Freedom! Freedom!"

Relatively rare protests in Cuba are often quickly broken up by plainclothes security forces, though the officers on Monday wore police uniforms.

In 2005, the Ladies in White appeared in the same park behind the plaza's monument to independence hero Jose Marti and delivered a letter to authorities demanding the release of all Cuban political prisoners.

Every Sunday, the group holds a silent protest march down Havana's busy Fifth Avenue, demanding the release of relatives jailed during a March 2003 roundup of 75 government critics.

Since the crackdown, 16 of the original 75 have since been released on medical parole and four more were freed into forced exile in Spain last month. Cuba accuses the activists and other opposition members of working with U.S. authorities to undermine the island's communist system, a charge the dissidents and Washington deny.