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Berta Soler Fernández and her husband Ángel Moya Acosta were detained on Friday by State Security agents and the National Police in the 10th of October municipality in Havana, to prevent them from attending a Mass that neither of them were aware of.
According to a report by Soler on her Facebook account, both had left at 2:35 PM from the national headquarters of the Ladies in White, located in the Lawton neighborhood, to conduct personal errands two blocks away.
Upon returning, around three in the afternoon, they were intercepted separately on the Porvenir and Bouza avenues: "We were detained in different patrol cars by State Security and National Police repressors," Soler wrote.
Inside the vehicles, an agent informed each of them that they would not be attending "any mass," describing it as "very important."
"We asked them separately what they were talking about," Soler reported, emphasizing that neither of them was aware of that religious event.
After about 30 minutes held inside the patrol cars, they were released but were followed to the national headquarters to prevent them from going back out onto the streets.
Soler summarized the situation in three words: "They are terrified."
The operation points to a coordinated pattern: the journalist Camila Acosta was also prevented from leaving her home by police and State Security agents to stop her from attending the mass at the Cathedral of Havana for the anniversary of the election of Pope Leo XIV, suggesting that this religious event was the reason behind both repressive actions.
The detention on Friday is not an isolated incident. On January 1, Soler was arrested while heading to the first mass of the year in Havana, and in April she reported to Martí Noticias an escalation of harassment: "The Department of State Security continues to violate our religious freedom with harassment, siege, threats of imprisonment, and surveillance on the streets."
During that same period, Soler reported an increase in repression against the Ladies in White, which included periods of house arrest lasting up to 48 days to prevent their participation in religious and public events.
Moya, for his part, is a former political prisoner from the so-called Group of 75, convicted during the Black Spring of 2003 and released in 2009; he rejected exile and continued his activism in Cuba alongside Soler.
Cubalex identified both among the main victims of repression in its semiannual report of March 2026, which documented a total of 179 victims, while the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights recorded 873 violations of religious freedom in Cuba during 2025.
Soler, winner of the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament and the Lech Wałęsa Solidarity Prize 2025, was unable to collect this last award in person precisely due to the restrictions imposed by the regime.
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