The political analyst Julio Shiling was emphatic in CiberCuba, stating that figures like Sandro Castro and Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, nicknamed "El Cangrejo," have no place in a free Cuba. He made this statement in an interview with journalist Tania Costa following his participation in the forum on the Constitution of 1940 held on June 1 at the Cuban Museum of the Diaspora in Miami.
«Sandro Castro and the Crab, let them forget about their club, about their home, they should go away, away, because they were part of that bloodthirsty machinery and cannot be at the expense of the Cuban people,» declared Shiling unambiguously.
Sandro Castro, the grandson of Fidel Castro and owner of Bar EFE in El Vedado, has become the most visible figure of the Castro dynasty on social media, with over 150,000 followers on Instagram. Despite declaring himself “revolutionary, but not communist”, he has sparked controversy due to his ostentatious lifestyle amidst the Cuban crisis, including a birthday party in December 2024 during a major national blackout.
Regarding "El Cangrejo," nicknamed for a congenital condition, he is the grandson of Raúl Castro and son of General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, who led the military-economic conglomerate GAESA until his death in July 2022. In 2016, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez was appointed head of the General Directorate of Personal Security at the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for protecting Raúl Castro himself. El País described him in May 2026 as a figure who "sits down to talk with the United States."
Beyond the exclusion of the nomenclature, Shiling outlined a comprehensive agenda for transitional justice. He proposes to repudiate the "odious debts" incurred by the Castro regime with lenders who were aware of the nature of the regime, and argues that "a free Cuban state has the right to take them to court and seek compensation for the years they exploited Cuban workers," referring to the foreign companies that operated on the island.
The analyst also defends the proscription of the Communist Party of Cuba under the concept of "militant democracy," although he clarified that there would indeed be space for democratic leftism. "Those who crafted the 1940 Constitution were primarily from the moderate left, that is, social democracy. The Communist Party is something entirely different."
Shiling also included a process of decommunization among the essential mechanisms: “All the symbolism, all the streets that glorify the terrorists who took power in 1959, all of that needs to be changed,” along with the removal of statues and a memorialization that preserves collective historical memory.
To defend the 1940 Constitution as the foundation of the transition—rather than drafting a new one from scratch—Shiling turned to a metaphor: "Someone might say: well, that’s all very nice, but let’s destroy it and make a new one. Another version could be: no, let’s fix it, let’s modernize it, but let’s keep that historical jewel," comparing the constitution to the Empire State Building.
"All of this that I have described fits in a reasonable, sensible, and conducive way to reconciliation by adopting the Constitution of 1940, which was an almost perfect example of democratic exercise," concluded Shiling.
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