Helena Houdova is a model who has appeared on numerous fashion magazines including 'Elle', 'Harper's Bazaar', 'Cosmopolitan' and Vogue amongst others. She started in the beauty queen circuit (like many others) and was crowned Miss Czech Republic, her father refused to let her model until she completed her university degree and she majored in Anthropology. She went on to become a finalist in the Miss World supermodel contest, and after completing her studies, she moved abroad to pursue modeling work through a Parisian agency and Houdová later relocated to New York City.
She is known for donating a large proportion of her earnings to charities for orphans and disadvantaged children. She looks after her four 'part time' adopted girls. She also has two children (Darien, Daveed Jakub) with U.S. businessman and entrepreneur Omar Amanat. She is President and Founder of a charity devoted to these causes called Sunflower Children which she started in 2000, which operate in 15 countries supporting 11,000 disadvantaged children .... so far, so very laudable.
However, sometimes "
humanitarian instincts", disregard the hard reality of the nasty world we live in ..... so imagine her surprise when on a trip to Communist Cuba with psychologist Mariana Kroftova, where they were taking photographs of a poverty ridden district in Havana, the
secret police turned up and arrested the pair of them ..... didn't they recognise a world 'humanitarian', or did they only see a very political activist, who was assuming that she was safe from the rules of that police state?
"
There was a lot of shouting as we were dragged off - and one of the officers shouted that we were terrorists", Helena Houdova said later. She said she and her psychologist friend Mariana Kroftova had made the trip to Havana to 'ascertain how children on the island could benefit from their charity work'.
Mariana Kroftova says she thought the eleven hours they spent in detention would never end: "
They took us to a police station where nobody spoke to us or properly explained what was going on. We were just able to make out that we were accused of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities against the Cuban regime. What was worse they refused to let us call the Czech embassy. So we spent the 11 hours without knowing what our fate would be."
They were not allowed to contact the Czech embassy throughout their arrest and could not communicate with their jailers in English. They in vain requested medical attention.
Cuba’s Charge d’Affaires, Aymee Hernandez said that they were arrested because they deliberately waged a campaign against Cuba in cooperation with Cuban dissidents. The Czech government said the Cuban police “
Clearly violated international law. The ministry also strongly disagreed that Czech citizens were arrested because they took pictures of Havana”.
Now with someone so saintly, what could I possibly say about her .... well the girls were only released, after they pledged in writing that they would not join any “
counter-revolutionary activities” in the country.
And everything points to a non political charitable act being suppressed in "
a land of political oppression". However Houdova, spoke to journalists after returning from Cuba, and in a moment that gave something of a lie to her assertion that she had no political motives, she told them that she would display
the pictures she took at an exhibition portraying the island not only as a tourist paradise, but also
as a land of political oppression.
The Cuban police had confiscated the roll of film that was in the Czech women’s camera, but Houdova had managed to conceal the memory card of her digital
camera inside her brassiere ... she said her
meetings with dissidents, the
wives of political prisoners, as well as with ordinary Cubans during her ten-day stay in Cuba made her recollect her childhood in Communist Czechoslovakia. “
I am not an expert on the political situation in Cuba but I think some kind of change is necessary there” she said. “
The revolution’s watchmen rose up because I was taking pictures of something they do not like” ... Does she mean the slums, or the dissidents, or the wives of political prisoners, or maybe the calls to change the regime?
There's always two sides to every story, and we sometimes just jump to the most obvious conclusion ... but it ain't always the whole truth
Trivia:
- According to FHM, "Houdová is one of the 'Top 100 Most Beautiful Women' in the world
Pictures:
