Sandro Castro, grandson of the dictator Fidel Castro, starred in a new viral moment this Sunday during a social media live session alongside the content creator known as 'El Guajiro de TikTok'.
In a conversation with the provocative influencer Jesús Arturo Blanco León, a content creator residing in the United States but sympathetic to the Cuban regime, Sandro openly expressed admiration for his deceased grandfather and referred to him as a "tanke" — a Cuban colloquial expression that praises someone's strength or virtues.
In the video shared on TikTok by the user @apoyo6531, Sandro referred to "La Piedra," a popular nickname that refers to the granite monolith that serves as the tomb and sarcophagus of the dictator Fidel Castro in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.
Blanco León, who at one point was exposed by journalist Mario Pentón as an opinion agent of the Castro regime, shared with Sandro a livestream he had recently conducted, which left him with a feeling of "sadness" and widespread bitterness among the Cuban exiles who wish for the regime's downfall.
"Look, I said: if La Piedra were still around, my brother, he would say 'gather all my loved ones,' because here, they leave everyone abandoned," said El Guajiro from TikTok, expressing his opinion on what Castro's reaction would have been to the legal offensive by the United States against Raúl and the relatives of both dictators.
The dictator's grandson took the opportunity to interrupt Blanco León with enthusiastic claims: "My brother, that was the tank, that was the tank!" Sandro said, raising his fist in a gesture of support for his grandfather. "The figures wouldn't have gone so far back," he concluded.
“Boy, I respect La Piedra, I really do, I always respect him,” El Guajiro de TikTok hastily said, to which Sandro replied in a philosophical tone: “But there’s always a way out, buddy. And after the bad times come the good ones. Remember that, it's a truth of life. There’s always a way out, and when something bad happens, the good follows.”
It is not the first time that the dictator's grandson refers to his grandfather with the nickname "La Piedra." On May 15, amidst a wave of nighttime protests in Havana over power outages, he posted on Instagram the message "Don't use La Piedra to start a fire", interpreted by many as a veiled defense of Fidel's legacy.
Ten days later, Sandro released another video titled "Presentin La Piedra", which reignited the debate regarding the ambiguous use of the term and its positioning in relation to the regime.
This pattern of statements contrasts with the criticisms that Sandro himself has directed at the current government. In an interview granted to CNN at the end of March, he stated that the ruling Miguel Díaz-Canel "is not doing a good job" and declared that "the majority of Cubans want capitalism, not communism."
In that same interview, Sandro revealed that State Security had summoned him for interrogation due to his satirical videos, highlighting the tension between his public persona and the power structures inherited by his family.
The funerary monolith that Sandro refers to as "The Stone" is a granite rock over four meters tall, extracted from the Las Guásimas quarry, near La Gran Piedra in the Sierra Maestra. It was designed in 2006, constructed starting in 2010, and completed on December 4, 2016, ten days after the dictator's death. The lid is made of green marble from Guatemala with the name "Fidel" inscribed on it.
In April, a young Cuban confronted Sandro during a TikTok live stream and harshly criticized him for his privileged lifestyle, in an episode that also received widespread attention on social media.
Sandro Castro's public profile in 2026 is defined by a combination of criticisms of the Díaz-Canel government and calls for the legacy of his grandfather, a ambiguity that continues to provoke reactions among Cubans both on the island and abroad.
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