‘Privileges Are the Gravediggers of Collective Rights’

The article below was authored by Michel Torres Corona, the 32-year-old host of the Cuban television program Con Filo. He is well-known in his country as a staunch supporter of the Cuban Revolution.

Torres Corona is the director of the Nuevo Milenio (New Millenium) publishing group and contributes to various national and international media outlets. The article that follows first appeared on July 9, 2026, in the Uruguayan online magazine Mate Amargo.

Torres Corona addressed a widespread controversy in Cuba, sparked by the participation of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, 41, in Cuba’s talks with the U.S. government in May. Known as Raulito, or “El Cangrejo” — “The Crab” — Rodríguez Castro is the grandson of  Raúl Castro,^[1] a central leader of the Cuban Revolution and a former president of Cuba. Rodríguez Castro is a colonel in Cuba’s interior ministry and has served in his grandfather’s security team.

Many Cubans questioned or objected to Rodríguez Castro’s participation in such high-level talks because he does not hold any elected or other formal position in the Cuban government and because his public conduct renders him “a symbol of wealthy partygoers, the type who wore designer clothes and flashy jewelry, imitating the mannerisms of the moneyed North,” in Torres Corona’s words.

The controversy was amplified when USA Today published an article on July 6, 2026, based on interviews with Rodríguez Castro conducted in Havana.

“I’ve never been interested in politics. It’s never been a calling of mine,” Rodríguez Castro told the U.S. daily. But, he added, “I can negotiate with anyone designated by the U.S. If given the opportunity, claro que con Trump.” (“Of course, with Trump.”) He also said that “if at some point the revolution needs me to step up, I will do it.”

The USA Today reporting is a piece of Washington’s efforts to sow divisions within Cuba’s leadership, and between Cuba’s government and working people, to try to find individuals the U.S. ruling class can work with, individuals who aspire to capitalist morals and values.

“Today, the once largely unknown bodyguard has become a key figure in Cuba’s talks with the United States, even though he has never held public office,” said a front-page article in the August 11 New York Times, referring to Rodríguez Castro, in another attempt to further Washington’s goals. “His name has even come up as someone the Trump administration might find acceptable to become Cuba’s next leader.”

The Times reported that Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos R. Fernández de Cossío, called accusations against Rodríguez Castro involving a human smuggling ring “slander.” This was in response to unfounded allegations of Rodríguez Castro’s involvement in such a ring, repeated prominently in the Times article and made by individuals convicted of crimes in the U.S.

Referring to the USA Today article, Torres Corona said the journalist who did the interview provided a sketch of Rodríguez Castro’s lifestyle, including “designer clothing, luxury briefcase, exclusive wines, dinners in restaurants.” A lifestyle that Rodríguez Castro lamented most people in Cuba did not share, but wished they could, and said he aspired to bringing that about.

This way of life stands in contrast to the dire straits in which the large majority of Cuba’s people live today as Washington has accelerated its decades-long economic war with an oil blockade and more recent restrictions threatening the country’s food supply.

The U.S. government is trying to topple the Cuban Revolution by depriving the country’s people of not just fuel — and everything that depends on it, like electricity and running water — but also food.

“Privileges are the gravediggers of collective rights,” Torres Corona remarked. “Where they flourish, the work of revolutions is eaten away.”

This is reminiscent of comments by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, one of the most well-known leaders of the Cuban Revolution. In a 1965 letter to Fidel Castro, just before Guevara left Cuba for internationalist missions, Che wrote this about the expected conduct of members of Cuba’s Communist Party and revolutionary government:

“The Party and every member must act as the vanguard, and this means that their conduct must approximate that of the communist ideal. Their standard of living… should never exceed that of their colleagues. A communist’s morality is their most prized possession, their true weapon, so it must be cherished, even in their private life… naturally there is no place for thieves, opportunists or Pharisees in the Party, regardless of past merit.”^[2]

Torres Corona’s column is significant, especially since there has been no public official response so far to this controversy by the Cuban government or state media.

Another public comment related to this debate took a different approach than that of Torres Corona. It came from Elier Ramírez Cañedo, a member of the Central Committee of Cuba’s Communist Party and of the country’s National Assembly. In a Facebook post on July 8, Ramírez Cañedo defended Rodríguez Castro’s participation in the talks with Washington and said Rodríguez Castro had been the subject of “character assassination” in the U.S. media.

On the other hand, Enrique Ubieta Gómez, editor of Cuba Socialista, the theoretical journal of Cuba’s Communist Party, published an article on July 28 in which he referred to the USA Today interview in a way similar to Torres Corona.

“A manipulated interview/profile of Raúl Guillermo … is offered up with extreme political naïveté and reveals his real weaknesses,” Ubieta Gómez wrote. “As expected, the latter generated revulsion and legitimate protests by revolutionaries; but it also led the counterrevolutionaries and reformists/autonomists of the twenty-first century to take advantage of this performance to point out the existence of individuals who betray socialist ideals.”

We publish the following article for the information of our readers. The headline and text below are from the original. Translation from Spanish, as well as breakers (subheadings), notes, and photos are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

*

The Crab and the Vampire

July 9, 2026

By Michel Torres Corona (*)

I assume that it started out as one of those restaurants in the 1990s that sold “delicacies of the sea” in foreign currency: fish, shellfish and other delights that, in the context of the Special Period^[3] and the concessions the Revolution had to make to survive, became increasingly inaccessible to the “simple table.” 

I should admit, I don’t know its history, and I only went there twice, during my time as a university student. The first time I had invited a young woman, with whom I was in love, to a Kelvis Ochoa concert (I did not know a single one of his songs). The second — and last — time, was when I and a group of friends ended our night there after going from dive bar to dive bar, with enough alcohol in our veins to keep our livers busy without the need to “consume” the “very dear” drinks served there. On both occasions, I felt out of place, in a strange environment.

Don Cangrejo — “Sir Crab” — was the name of the place. Located on the coast, it was designed like a boat, with lots of wood. It was spacious and attractive. It went on to become a nightlife epicenter of a certain layer of wealthy partygoers who could pay a cover charge of 5 or 10 CUC — our commie, island-made version of the dollar created by the Central Bank of Cuba as a second national currency, equivalent to that foreign currency, and now non-existent after the Reordering Task.^[4]

Somebody should write about the comings and goings of our recent economic history, as interesting as it is frustrating, but that won’t be me.

Social inequality

Don Cangrejo began to bring together a proto-bourgeoisie that attended regularly, in contrast to the “bohemians” who used to hang out en masse on Calle G (G Street) in Vedado.^[5] The nightspot was the flagship of a burgeoning social class with an above-average income. Inequality, practically nonexistent in the 1980s, was becoming consolidated as a social threat, but it was still tolerable.

If you didn’t have any money, you could sit anywhere on Calle G with a bottle of rum and spend the whole night there with your guitar, or listening to your music or the music of any of the hundreds of young people who would converge there. It was definitely the majority who were there, as heterogenous as could be, and that was comforting. The “proto-bourgeois Crab-goers” often felt drawn by that dynamic as well. 

At the end of the first decade of this century and the beginning of the second, the reforms began, referred to at the time as the “updating of the economic model.” Don Cangrejo began to face flourishing competition in the private sector, which was described — as a result of our tradition of euphemisms — as “self-employment.”

The proto-bourgeoisie spread themselves out among the nightspots and bars/discos, and the partygoers’ flagship began down the path of decline. In parallel, the bubble culture (which is inseparable from capitalist development, and precedes — although it does not seem to — the bubbles and echo chambers fostered by cyberspace and virtual reality) began chipping away at the bohemian horizontality of Calle G, which also began emptying out.

But Don Cangrejo remained in the popular imagination for a time as a symbol of wealthy partygoers, the type who wore designer clothes and flashy jewelry, imitating the mannerisms of the moneyed North. However, they no longer needed that space, which — to top it off — was state-run.

The culture of the Havana proto-bourgeoisie, which spread throughout the rest of the country, began to merge with that of a certain layer of our migrants to the United States, even before the Internet and its late-arriving but frenetic growth converted Miami and Cuba into a single digital community.

And it was precisely thanks to the Internet that I saw the video for the first time: a white man, not much older than I, dancing at a concert by Gente de Zona, a popular Cuban reggaeton group. He was moving his head, imitating a dance popularized by those musicians, and pouring water over himself. He was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo of the New York Yankees, the best-known team of the U.S. major leagues, and it was personalized, on the back, with the words “EL CANGREJO” (THE CRAB).

The video was a typical demonstration of the ridiculousness of the Cuban proto-bourgeoisie, fond of frequenting celebrity bars and displaying the typical vassalic esthetic of the nouveau riche, close to the “artists of the moment.” However, it had gone viral due to a characteristic of its main character: The Crab was the grandson of General of the Army Raúl Castro Ruz.

Pictures of the grandson in similar environments, exuding an indifferent vanity, circulated in social media, but those of us who are revolutionaries and members of revolutionary organizations ignored it. To question his lifestyle meant, transitively, to question the leadership of the Revolution, and that type of questioning only fed into the morbid curiosity of our enemies, those who profited (and profit) from any sign of division.

Sandro Castro, ‘The Vampire’

He also wasn’t the worst of the offspring: there are children of legendary commanders of the Revolution who have shamelessly embraced the discourse and agenda of the most conservative, extreme Miami right wing, what we could classify as classic gusanos.^[6] And in recent years, the spotlight has shone on one of Fidel’s grandchildren, the notorious Sandro Castro, who became one of the most high-profile cretins of our mediocre “influencer” ecosystem.

Sandro decided to “go viral” on social media by uploading unfunny videos where, speaking with the accent of a fentanyl-consuming reggaeton fan, he claimed to be a vampire who drank beer instead of blood. “A Cristach for the Vampirach” he would repeat like a mantra, referring to the beer brand Cristal, “Cuba’s favorite.”

The only thing that made him a trending topic was the insolent way his identity and discourse collided with the image of Fidel held not only by revolutionaries, but even more so by his enemies. Nobody admires Fidel more than his enemies, no matter how much they squirm when they pronounce his name, and there is no better proof of that admiration than the wrathful way they comment on every new video by the “Vampire.”

Until very recently, Sandro was never “interested in politics.” He limited himself to uploading his demented videos, or to showing himself in modern automobiles like a bon vivant, but without getting too involved in controversies associated with the government.

Of course, even if he was unaware of it, his whole attitude was political and subversive by becoming a form of “semiotic ammunition,” not so much against the Cuban government as against what is more important, against what is sacred: the revolutionary project. Because the Revolution had committed to promoting “the new man,” to being like Che, and the cyber-vampire was anything but that. 

Precisely because he was Fidel’s grandson and because of his irreverent rudeness, CNN arrived at his home, which was lit up despite the typical evening power outage, but surrounded by utter darkness. Patrick Oppmann, the CNN correspondent in Cuba, recorded him in his natural habitat — like filming a little creature in the woods — and supplied him with all the talking points he needed.

And Sandro, with his cretinous gall, answered question after question, saying that he enjoyed no privileges or freebies, that he was just trying to get ahead, that his videos were a way of having fun … but it was time to talk about politics, and the Vampire, enthusiastic, did not hesitate. He criticized the government and declared himself capitalist, like “most Cubans,” he said (according to whatever census was populating his childish mind).

USA Today interview with ‘The Crab’

The U.S. media apparently has a taste for the grandchildren of revolutionary leaders. Recently, USA Today traveled to Havana, not to interview President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the legitimate representative of the Cuban people, but to do a profile of Raúl Guillermo, aka The Crab.

And they could not have chosen a better moment to publish it: the day before an extraordinary debate, requested and led by another legitimate representative of our people, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez,^[7] at the United Nations General Assembly, to denounce the genocidal blockade intensified by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the rest of the fascistic gang that runs that decadent and sick empire we know as the United States.

It was the same day our national electric energy system collapsed, leaving the entire country without electricity.

In the middle of this generalized power outage, with what I had left of cellphone coverage, I managed to read this interview, in which The Crab — just like his vampire cousin — appropriated for himself the right to speak for the Cuban people, and even to “propose himself” to negotiate with anyone, even the current emperor, Mr. Trump.

Like the “Cristach” boy, The Crab said that he wasn’t much interested in politics, BUT … if he had to step up and do it, there he would be. And to complete this gesture of inflated demagoguery, similar to that of any electoral show candidate, he claimed that it pained him that others — the people — don’t live like he does. It is that goal, that someday we can live like he does, that motivates him to get up every day.

I could barely hold the tears back as I read that confession of altruism, or when he showed off his thick gold necklace, featuring the initials of his grandfather and great-uncle (Raúl and Fidel Castro, respectively, in case of any doubts).

The journalist who had been sent did not miss her opportunity and provided us with a sketch of this life to which we may aspire, if The Crab finally fulfills his dream, for us to be like him: designer clothing, luxury briefcase, exclusive wines, dinners in restaurants and working lunches with the Army General, after having read all sorts of secret documents.

I never saw them at Don Cangrejo (the two times I was there, only one of which I remember clearly), but I am almost sure that both the Vampire and his cousin frequented it or similar places. The doors would have swung wide open for celebrities of their pedigree.

Their ethics and esthetics were not those of the Revolution, but we revolutionaries and members of revolutionary organizations ignored that — total silence — because to say anything was an attack on unity, an attack on the project.

But the noise they are making is now deafening, and there is no speech or demand that can calm the indignation caused by those fruits of “sociolista” nepotism [Cuban slang for cronyism, a play on the word socialismo, socialism in Spanish]. What justifies their impunity?

To usurp the functions of government, to take on a public role for which nobody elected you, to proclaim yourself the spokesperson for new measures or paths charted for the country… Would anyone else be allowed to do that? To go around making fun of government officials, of the men and women who sacrifice themselves every day to keep the country afloat, flirting with the enemies of our project, so full of shadows yet also so much light… Would anyone else be allowed to do that?

Privileges are the gravediggers of collective rights

Privileges are the gravediggers of collective rights. Where they flourish, the work of revolutions is eaten away. It has always been like that. When those privileges are brandished indecently, they lacerate the consensus that holds up resistance; they are a dynamite blast to the social pact that gives meaning to a counterhegemonic project.

And when there are people who use their surnames to kidnap the voice of a nation, whether by childish dabbling in the media or in the dark halls of the state apparatus, it weakens the legacy of those whose names were made with sacrifice and virtue.

The Cuban people, whose identity was forged — and is still being forged — in the heat of the Revolution as a historic process of struggle for social justice and true sovereignty, know how to identify false idols, whether they are collecting “likes” or posing for magazines. They follow only those leaders who, as our poets and minstrels have sung, lead the charge, galloping with machete in hand, on the front lines; they recognize only the moral authority of whoever is willing to be the last to eat and the first to die.

And it is within the people, of course, that all the keys are to be found for victory or for its dark reversal.

Unity is not built on acritical submission or that rhetorical commonplace that lightly makes the accusation of “giving arms to the enemy.” Unity is built, as Fidel would say, against annexationists and sellouts, and above all, against the corrupt.

There are many ways of being corrupted; there are many ways of corrupting an ideal. In face of the unrelenting threat of imperialism, corrupt to the core with selfishness and ambition, our united front should join together around values that are the opposite: dignity, honor, decency, altruism, honesty, solidarity, modesty.

The Revolution is in danger; we have to save it ourselves

The Revolution is in danger, and we all know it. And it is not going to be saved by offspring who are corrupted by foolishness and frivolity. We have to save it ourselves, those of us who are on the side of the nonconformists, with or without a membership card; those of us who suffer reality in all its harshness; those of us who don’t have to engage in abstract thinking to understand the terrible cost of continuing to resist such a brutal siege.

And as long as the government of the Republic and the Party are up to the task of those everyday sacrifices, they will have our support, and they will continue to be the poles of articulation for our united front, patriotic and communist, which must oppose the imperialist appetites.

There is no room in that front for bon vivants or princes, or any aristocracy at all: only a radical project, for the humble and by the humble, can give meaning and worth to the feat that has been and will be triumphing amid such disadvantageous conditions.

Like Orwell’s pigs,^[8] there are those who will repudiate their revolutionary heritage (more or less subtly), and who will seek to wear the attire of the exploiter, and sit at the table of the powerful. They are signs of bourgeoisification, of the liberal idea of prosperity; they are degenerative signs.

We cannot continue ignoring those signs; there cannot continue to be impunity or condescension. It is a time of urgency, and the trenches must be shaken with telluric force, so that whatever is rotten will fall to the ground. We run the risk of vampires draining our blood, and crabs turning into cancer. To allow them to do so would be to give our enemy the best weapons of all.

 (*) Michel E. Torres Corona, attorney and Cuban communicator, is the host of the Cuban television program “Con Filo.” He is the director of the Nuevo Milenio publishing group and contributes to various national and international media outlets.

NOTES

[1] Raúl Castro, 95, is a lifelong leader of the Cuban Revolution. He served as Commander of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces from 1959 to 2008, and as the country’s president from 2008 to 2018 (becoming acting president in 2006). He holds the title General of the Army, Cuba’s highest military post. Castro was indicted by the U.S. justice department on May 20, 2026, on bogus charges of murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens stemming from a 1996 incident over Cuban territorial waters.

[2] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Argentine by birth, was a commander of the guerrilla forces during the Cuban Revolution and a leader of Cuba’s new revolutionary government, spearheading the agrarian land reform and literacy campaigns alongside other roles. Inspired by revolutionary possibilities in Africa and Latin America, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 for internationalist missions. He was captured and executed in Bolivia by CIA-assisted forces in 1967.

Fidel Castro was the central leader of the Cuban revolution. He headed the July 26 Movement, the main organization that led the guerilla struggle which toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He served as prime minister of Cuba from 1959 until 1976 and as the country’s president from 1976 until his retirement in 2008. He died in 2016.

Che’s 1965 letter to Fidel can be found in I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervor; Letters, 1947-1967 by Ernesto Che Guevara and Aleida Guevara [in the section titled “Letters as a leader of the revolutionary government (1959-1965).”] See also World-Outlook’s review of this insightful book

[3] During the 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Cuba faced its first severe economic crisis since the victory of the revolution in 1959. Confronted with the cutoff of trade at preferential prices with the former Soviet Union, Cuba suddenly faced a 35% plunge in economic production (equal or greater than the decline of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s). Those years are often referred to as the “Special Period in Time of Peace.”

At the same time, Washington intensified its economic warfare against Cuba as the Revolution tried to get new trading partners and sources of capital. Enemies of the Revolution everywhere predicted the “impending” collapse of the workers and farmers republic. Revolutionary minded working people in Cuba, however, defended their socialist revolution in face of these difficulties, showing that the Cuban government remained their government. And they continued to reach out to the oppressed and exploited around the world, aiding anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.

[4] The CUC (Convertible Cuban Peso) was one of Cuba’s two official currencies used from 1994 until it was phased out on January 1, 2021. The Reordering Task was an economic overhaul enacted during the Covid-19 pandemic, aimed at retiring the convertible currency among other goals. Pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, the CUC was used as a substitute for foreign currency, and for years, Cuban working people exchanged their pesos for CUC to buy a range of food items and consumer goods in state-run “CUC stores,” as well as for goods and services in the tourism and foreign business sector. These stores were known officially as “hard currency collection stores” (tiendas de recaudación de divisas in Spanish).

[5] Vedado is a central business and residential district in Havana, Cuba, located a few miles west of Old Havana. It is bordered by Central Havana to the east, the Almendares River to the west, and the Malecón waterfront on the north.

[6] Gusano is the Spanish word for “worm.” In a political and historic context, it is a derogatory term Cuban revolutionaries initially used to describe right-wing Cubans who fled the island after the 1959 revolution. It was later used as a slur to describe anyone who left Cuba (especially during the 1980s), because leaving the country was widely perceived as a betrayal of the Revolution, and also to describe anti-communist Cubans whether or not they lived abroad. Many Cubans now reject the use of this term, since it is widely accepted that you can be critical of the government without necessarily being anti-communist. It is an extremely loaded term that most Cubans do not use lightly.

[7] See ‘Red Card for U.S. at UN!’ Cuban Foreign Minister Calls out Hypocrisy of U.S. Claims Over Blockade published by World-Outlook on July 12, 2026.

[8] This is a reference to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (published in 1945). It is an allegorical novel — a scathing satire of a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism. A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus, the stage is set for one of the most satiric fables ever penned — a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. The pigs are the farm animals that become dictators. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” as the fable puts it referring to the pigs. The novel is considered an allegory to the betrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the counter-revolution of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

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