By Grazie Pozo Christie
Optics are everything – at least, in politics. And the display of women Democrats dressed in white and looking sour as President Trump condemned socialism and late-term abortion was an exercise in poor optics.
Here in Miami, what we fondly call the capital of Latin America, a group of women dressed in white as a sign of protest means only one thing: The Ladies in White of Cuba.
The Damas de Blanco are the mothers and wives of jailed Cuban dissidents, who dress in white and wear pictures of their loved ones and the years of their sentence pinned to their blouses while they walk to church on Sundays in Havana. They chose white after Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who demonstrated in white to demand information about their “disappeared” children in the 1970’s. The Cuban women started their weekly marches in 2003, after the government sentenced 75 librarians, journalists and human rights activists to decades in prison for criticizing the Castro dictatorship. Each Sunday the Damas de Blanco are regularly harassed, beaten and hauled into police detention, yet they keep showing up each week. They are brave, very brave, in the way they stand up to power in defense of human dignity.
The white-clad women at the State of the Union looked silly by comparison.
