The war against Jose

Amid an international campaign for the release of a dissident, Granma, Cuba´s Communist Party newspaper, dedicated an unusual editorial on Wednesday to attacking the country’s best-known political prisoner, José Daniel Ferrer, and the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Under the governments of Fidel and Raúl Castro and their current successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the names of very few dissidents and members of the opposition have ever appeared on state media, an attempt to deprive them of public visibility.

But the intense international campaign, with calls from Amnesty International, regional organizations and politicians from several countries to release Ferrer, seems to have forced the government to respond with accusations of its own directed against a frequent target: the United States.

Granma accused the U.S. of leading “a new slander and discredit campaign against Cuba,” using “the arrest of the counterrevolutionary José Daniel Ferrer” as a pretext.

The unsigned editorial said Ferrer was “a salaried agent serving the United States, with a long history of provocative actions against public order and legality.”