Cuba called a Miami foe a ‘big bad she-wolf.’ Now, a new critic gets a sexist nickname
During Ileana Ros Lehtinen’s decades in Congress, Cuban government officials and state media journalists referred to the CubanAmerican politician as la loba feroz — the big bad she-wolf — an attack on her tough Cuba policies as well as a display of the common sexism at the top of the island’s hierarchy.
Now, the communist government has identified a new female foe. And she, too, is being called names.
A story in the Communist Party newspaper Granma on Friday lashed out at Miami Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, a former journalist who now chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on
Western Hemisphere Affairs. The headline and the story called her “the hyena.”
Granma leveled a barrage of accusations against Salazar without presenting evidence. The newspaper asserted that she worked for the CIA while she was a journalist, was close to terrorists and has taken money from fellow Cuban Americans in Congress.
“Who recruited, trained and chose her as a replacement for the big bad shewolf?” the article asks.
The byline on the piece is Francisco Arias Fernandez, who is a colonel in Cuba’s feared Interior Ministry and works for several state media outlets. Increasingly, Cuban state media have been hiring or using state security agents and other members of the Interior Ministry to cover for the absence of trained journalists, who have left state media in droves in recent years.
Salazar seems to have hit a nerve when she cast doubt on the independence of the emerging private sector on the island during a congressional hearing last month, calling it “a myth” and a government “ruse.”
Historically, CubanAmerican politicians who the Cuban government identifies as political adversaries have usually been derided by state media, but only women seem to have been called names or been compared to animals.
“Among its many horrible faults, misogyny is one of the traits of the dictatorship,” said Ros-Lehtinen, who represented MiamiDade District 27, the same one that reelected Salazar in 2022. “Women politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere continue being the target of the despotic regime. Female ex-political prisoners are the subject of much harassment and persecution in Cuba and elsewhere.”
But the supposed “slur” against her from the regime, she said, never landed. Instead, she saw it as “confirmation that I was dedicated to telling the truth about its abuses against the Cuban people and the continued human rights violations on the island.”
She embraced it humorously and even purchased a Florida license plate with the nickname.
“It was a high honor when the dictatorship labeled me La Loba Feroz,” said Ros-Lehtinen, who is now a lobbyist for the Washington, D.C., law firm Akin.
Salazar took taking a similar approach in a statement to the Miami Herald, highlighting her “denunciations of the continued violations of human rights” on the island.
“In memory of my grandmother Elvira Machado, who was part of the urban resistance, and my grandfather Rafael Bermudo, who lost everything at 50 years old; the separated families and the thousands of Cubans who drowned in the Florida Straits, I will continue to use my position won with the free vote of my constituents to be a stone in the shoe of the dictatorship on the island,” she said.
She added: “To the bureaucrats of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee and its puppet Granma: You will have the ‘hyena’ Maria Elvira Salazar for a while.”