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The Cuban lawyer and presenter Michel Torres Corona published an article titled "The Crab and the Vampire" on Thursday in the leftist Uruguayan portal Mate Amargo, in which he openly questions the impunity with which Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as "The Crab," has taken on the role of negotiator for the Cuban regime in Washington without holding any elected government position.
The text that Torres Corona publishes in a foreign media outlet because the official Cuban television does not allow him to say it arrives amid a week of intense controversy sparked by the interview that El Cangrejo granted to USA Today on Sunday, his first with a U.S. media outlet, in which he declared himself willing to negotiate directly with Trump the future of Cuba and stated that "it hurts me a lot that people cannot live like I do," while he appeared dressed in Hugo Boss, wearing Hermès sneakers and a Rolex Submariner watch.
Torres Corona, host of the program "Con Filo" on Cuban Television, constructs his critique from a cultural genealogy: he traces the journey of the Havana restaurant Don Cangrejo—epicenter of the emerging "protobourgeoisie" during the Special Period, with an entrance fee ranging from five to ten CUC, making it inaccessible to most—up to the image of Raúl Castro's grandson dancing at a Gente de Zona concert in a personalized New York Yankees shirt with the nickname "EL CANGREJO," a video that went viral on social media.
The author does not write from a position of break with the system, but from within: he is a media portrait of the regime that had already been censored in April 2026 when he attempted to broadcast a critique of Sandro Castro, Fidel's grandson, following his interview with CNN.
The segment was blocked, and Torres Corona published the clip on Facebook, highlighting the internal tensions that are now resurfacing with greater intensity.
In the article, Torres Corona also discusses the figure of Sandro Castro, the "vampire" who went viral with eccentric videos and was interviewed by CNN correspondent Patrick Oppman, where he criticized Díaz-Canel and expressed support for capitalism.
For the author, both characters—El Cangrejo and El Vampiro—represent the same contradiction: they are offsprings of the revolutionary power that, consciously or unconsciously, collide with the values of the "new man" that the Revolution promised.
The piece by Torres Corona adds to a series of critical voices that have emerged this week from within the official circles themselves.
Singer-songwriter Israel Rojas issued a public apology on Wednesday for having been "naive" by not believing for years the allegations about the privileges of the elite, and the mother of the head of Communication at the Palace of the Revolution demanded on Facebook that someone "silence" Raúl's grandson.
The leadership responded swiftly. On Thursday, the PCC official Elier Ramírez Cañedo came out to defend El Cangrejo as “the interlocutor for the Cuban side, by decision of the country's highest leadership,” and this Friday, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero accused critics of executing “a well-designed plan to generate uncertainty and distrust,” labeling the criticism as “reputation assassinations.”
The fact that Torres Corona—an official media presenter—turns to a Uruguayan portal to pose questions that Cuban television prohibits is, in itself, a symptom of the divisions that the figure of El Cangrejo has created even among those who support the system: "What justifies his impunity?" is the question that the article leaves unanswered.
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