Those pesky "mercenaries"

When it comes to dealing with internal opposition, you can always predict how the Castro regime will respond.

First, they send in their fascist goons – the euphemistically named "rapid response brigades" – to intimidate and harass, as happened last week in Havana in separate incidents involving the Damas de Blanco and Dr Darsi Ferrer.

Then they use their extensive (and very successful) propaganda machine to discredit the “mercenaries”.

Which is why the official propaganda sheet of the regime, Granma, has today devoted no less than one and a half pages to attacking one of the “mercenaries”.

But curiously, the target is neither Dr Ferrer nor the Damas de Blanco. Not even Osvaldo Paya.

Instead, the target is Elizardo Sanchez, the high-profile head of the illegal Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

The claims? According to the Granma piece, Sanchez is an egotist, a liar and a media tart ... as well as a fully-fledged “mercenary” who uses donations from evil foreign organisations in the United States to enrich himself.

It’s quite a virulent attack, as you can read here (in Spanish) or here (in English).

This is not the first time the regime has attacked Sanchez, a one-time professor of Marxism who has spent more than eight years in prison in the past for distributing “enemy propaganda”.

In recent years, the regime has bizarrely accused him of being both, an ego-driven US ”mercenary” AND an agent for State security, informing on his fellow "mercenaries".

Go figure.