Cuban police break up women's sit-in demanding freedom for political prisoners

Police broke up a peaceful sit-in by a small group of women demanding the release of their jailed husbands, forcing them aboard a bus at a park near the offices of Cuban President Raul Castro and driving them home.

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.

Several hours later, the communist-run government took the unusual step of telling Cubans about the incident and defending its handling of the sit-in. It described the protest as a "provocation" by mercenaries working for the United States, a common official characterization of dissidents.

"Neither provocations, nor the tales of mercenaries using methods ordered up by their Yankee masters will make a dent in the steadfastness and will of the current and future generations of Cubans who work to build a better society," said a government statement read by a broadcaster on the evening news.

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

Every Sunday, the Ladies in White hold 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.