UPDATED, April 20, 2011 — The four activists were released after a short detention, but not before they were beaten. Listen to their accounts here.
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Rosa Parks today had to be smiling down on the city of Santa Clara, Cuba, today, proud of how four Cuban women, using her name as their banner, took to the streets to demand their rights and to demand their freedom.
The Cuban women — Damaris Moya Portieles, Donaida Pérez Paseiro, Yaimara Reyes Mesa and Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, members of the Rosa Parks Feminist Movement for Civil Rights — marched through Santa Clara shouting slogans like, "The streets belong to the people!" "Down with the Castros!" and "We don't want hunger, we want freedom!"
Following close behind was a Castroite mob, responding to the women with threats, scorn and venom, all on behalf of a regime that today set for Cuba a course for the future that remains set in the failures and repression of the past.
Eventually, the political police — which all along was directing the reprisals against the women — moved in and took them away.
The demonstration, and the regime's reprisal, in Santa Clara was in response to the communist party congress, which accepted Fidel Castro's "retirement" as party chief and "elected" Raúl Castro its new leader. Similar confrontations have taken place across the island in recent days, most dramatically on Monday when the secret police in Havana arrested activist Sara Fonseca, her husband and her eldest son.
Each one reminds that despite the pronouncements from Raúl Castro about "reforms" and "term limits," his time, and that of his despicable regime — an evil worse than even what Rosa Parks helped bring down in the United States — are long gone.
The Cuban people are demanding it: IT IS TIME FOR THEM TO GO!
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