Cuban Bloggers Detained, Beaten

On Friday, three bloggers and activists in Cuba were detained and beaten by the Cuban authorities. Yoani Sanchez, Claudia Cadelo, and Omar Luís Pardo Laz were dragged into a car, violently beaten, and left in the street. Global Voices Online translates Sánchez’s own harrowing account of the incident:

We were left aching, lying in a street in Timba, a woman approached, ‘What has happened?’… ‘A kidnapping,’ I managed to say. We cried in each others arms in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about Teo, for God’s sake how am I going to explain all these bruises. How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street. How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.

Read the rest at Global Voices Online.