Laura Pollan, who helped found the dissident group Ladies in White after her husband was jailed in a 2003 crackdown on government opponents, died on Friday in a Havana hospital at the age of 63, her family and fellow dissidents said.
The pugnacious Pollan was one of Cuba's leading opposition voices and deeply involved in promoting change on the Communist island until she developed a pulmonary illness and went into the hospital on October 7. She had been on a respirator in the intensive care ward of Calixto Garcia hospital ever since and died of cardiac arrest, said Berta Soler, her long-time co-leader of the Ladies in White.
Husband Hector Maseda told Reuters at the hospital that a medical team had tried for an hour to revive her without success. "I asked to see her and went to see her body. I was there with her for a while, alone," said the visibly shaken Maseda.
Elizardo Sanchez, head of the independent Cuban Commission of Human Rights, said the loss of Pollan was a big one for opponents of the Cuban government. "It's really bad news for the human rights and pro-democracy movement. It's an irreparable loss. We'll see with time if others step forward to take her place," he said.
Maseda said an autopsy would be conducted, then her body would be cremated and there would be wake in their home in Central Havana. Her ashes would be spread in a field of flowers, as she had once requested, he said. All would be private, he said, because "we don't want the wake to become an act or propaganda."