Berta Soler

Berta Soler is the leader of the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco), the Cuban dissident movement founded in 2003 by wives and mothers of the political prisoners arrested in that year's Black Spring crackdown. The movement's members attend Sunday Mass dressed in white and march peacefully in public; their gatherings are routinely broken up by State Security. Soler took over as leader after the death of Laura Pollan in 2011 and has since become the movement's most visible public figure. She has been arrested and detained numerous times over more than a decade of activism. In May 2026 the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) documented her same-day brief detention as part of a month that recorded 332 repressive actions in Cuba.

The Ladies in White operate under a specific form of harassment: they are typically detained before or after Sunday Mass, held for hours or a day, and released without formal charges. This pattern is designed to disrupt without producing the political liability of long-term sentences against women who march peacefully. Soler's profile has made her a target of more sustained attention; she has received international human-rights awards and has testified before foreign legislatures about conditions in Cuba.

Two of the three UNPACU women facing prison sentences in Santiago de Cuba for protesting the 2024 blackouts are former Ladies in White members, which illustrates the organisational overlap between Cuba's Catholic dissident networks and the broader opposition. Soler's continued leadership of the movement despite persistent detention cycles makes her one of the most durable figures in Cuban civil-society resistance.