Cuba used to call a Miami foe ‘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 Cuban-American 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.”

In an all-out attack, Granma leveled a barrage of accusations against Salazar with no evidence — from working for the CIA while she was a journalist to being close to terrorists to taking money from fellow Cuban-American congressmen.

“Can her decades of service to [regime] subversion, her intimacy with gangsters and terrorist mafias be hidden?” the article asks. “Who recruited, trained and chose her as a replacement for the big bad she-wolf? To whom does she owe the millions to catapult herself to Congress? How much [journalistic] coverage by orders from the... CIA and the State Department?”

“How much do you receive from your colleagues Marco Rubio, Mario Díaz-Balart, or from your idols, such as Ileana Ros and the veteran in corrupt and opportunistic affairs, [U.S. Sen.] Bob Menéndez?” the article continued.

The byline on the piece is Francisco Arias Fernandez, a colonel in Cuba’s feared Interior Ministry who works as a journalist for several state media outlets. Increasingly, Cuban state media, including television, 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.”

Republicans and Democrats in Congress clash over existence of the private sector in Cuba

Shortly after, Cuban diplomat Johana Tablada published a piece criticizing Salazar’s tough stance on Cuba that was laced with personal attacks. And in an interview with CNN en Español, a top Economy Ministry official also pushed back on some of the claims made by the Miami representative during the hearing.

Cuba pushes back against claims in Congress that its private sector is a ‘myth’

Historically, Cuban American politicians whom the Cuban government identifies as political adversaries have usually been derided by state media, but only women seem to have been called names or compared to animals.

“Among its many horrible faults, misogyny is one of the traits of the dictatorship,” said Ros-Lehtinen, who used to represent Miami-Dade District 27, the same 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. lawfirm Akin.

Salazar took taking a similar approach in a statement to the Miami Herald in response to the Cuba story, 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.”