Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer has lashed out at the Spanish Executive, whom he labels "accomplice" of Castroism, and has reproached the European Union for having maintained a "lukewarm" attitude towards Cuba until now. Even so, he believes there is still room for Brussels to rectify now that "the end of the tyranny is in sight" and to align itself with the Cuban citizenry, not only for ethical reasons but also to safeguard its economic interests on the island.
According to Ferrer, the position of the Spanish Government, the PSOE, and President Pedro Sánchez himself, "is complicit" with the Castro regime. In an interview with Europa Press during the tour he is undertaking in several European countries, including Spain, he also lamented that "that of the EU, because of the Spanish Government, is too lukewarm and ambiguous."
The leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and former political prisoner -- he was one of the 75 opponents arrested in the Black Spring of 2003 and was last released in October 2025, when he went into exile in Miami -- indicated that, "out of dignity," he decided not to request meetings with government representatives or with the PSOE during his visit to Spain. Instead, he did hold meetings with the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, with the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, and with other officials from both parties.
"Pedro Sánchez and the Spanish left overlook the terrible drama that the people of Cuba are experiencing in terms of human rights, repression, extreme poverty, while the high leaders live like millionaires with all the privileges and subject the people to the deepest misery," he denounced.
Ferrer has compared the current situation with the involvement of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Venezuela, stating that, just as the former leader "has been an accomplice of the Chavista regime, the entire Spanish Government has been an accomplice of the Cuban regime in recent times in a shameful way." In his opinion, this attitude responds to "a combination of ideological identity and economic interests."
Europe, called to react before the end of Castroism
For the leader of UNPACU, the "tragedy" that the Cuban population is going through, especially political prisoners, and the fact that "the end of the dictatorship is in sight, it is felt in the air," oblige the EU to review its relationship with Havana. He considers that it "would not be good for Cubans or for Europe" that, when that outcome occurs, Brussels maintains an "overly confusing" link that, in practice, ends up favoring Castroism.
"If they want to preserve their economic interests in Cuba, they are completely obliged to assume an honest role, a role of solidarity with the victims of human rights violations, because the end of the regime is going to happen at any moment," he has warned, predicting that, with high probability, it will occur this very year.
The opposition leader has warned that Spain and other European states with investments on the island expose themselves to a cost "from a moral as well as an economic point of view," considering that "a free and democratic Cuba that only feels gratitude towards the United States, obviously will not have the slightest desire or will not have much desire to have as commercial partners those who were accomplices of the tyranny."
For this reason, he has appealed, "with all due respect," to both Spain and European institutions to "rectify their stance towards Cuba, to side with the suffering and the oppressed, and to sanction, condemn the Castro-communist regime, in the same way that they have done with the Chavista regime and the Sandinista regime," alluding to the sanctions that the EU has imposed on the governments of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
"They have no other option now, neither from a moral point of view," stressed Ferrer, who judges "the stance they have taken lately as serious and grave," nor from an economic perspective, since, in his opinion, "they are risking the interests they have left in Cuba."