The new year began in Cuba just as it ended 2016: with more repression against dissidents and opponents, reports Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

 "Las Damas de Blanco we had planned to go to the first mass of the year, the Peace Mass, which was celebrated on the 1st of May in the Cathedral of Havana. Twelve of us were arrested, leaving our homes or in the vicinity of More than 20 homes were besieged, "said Berta Soler, leader of Damas de Blanco, a movement created in 2003 by wives and mothers of the 75 political prisoners of the Black Spring for opposing Fidel Castro. 

 Fourteen years later, the government of his brother, Raúl Castro, has intensified his attacks on the heirs of that struggle. The thaw between Cuba and the United States has brought a rebound effect that the administration of Barack Obama did not expect. Repressive records broke down in 2016, despite the historic rapprochement with the US president.

The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) documented 9,351 detentions during 2016, with a special note: 5,383 were carried out against women and 3,968 against men. A thousand arrests more than in 2015.

The resurgence of repression is  a sign of the mixture of nervousness of the leaders in the middle of the succession and the clumsiness of their mechanisms of social control. Raul Castro plans to leave office in February 2018, although everything indicates that he will continue to move the country's threads from the general secretariat of the Communist Party and with the absolute fidelity of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

As reported in El Mundo.