The Cuban lawyer and presenter Michel Torres Corona published an article titled “The Crab and the Vampire” on Thursday on the leftist Uruguayan portal Mate Amargo, where 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 published by Torres Corona in a foreign media outlet, since Cuban state television does not allow him to say it, comes amid a week of intense controversy sparked by the interview that El Cangrejo gave to USA Today on Sunday, his first with an American media outlet, in which he declared himself willing to negotiate directly with Trump about the future of Cuba and stated that "it pains me greatly that people cannot live like I do," while appearing dressed in Hugo Boss, with Hermès sneakers and a Rolex Submariner watch.
Torres Corona, host of the program "Con Filo" on Cuban Television, builds 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 entry fee of five to ten CUC that made it inaccessible for most—up to the image of Raúl Castro's grandson dancing at a Gente de Zona concert in a New York Yankees shirt personalized with the nickname "EL CANGREJO," a video that went viral on social media.
The author does not write from a position of rupture with the system, but from within: he is a media figure of the regime who had already been censored in April 2026 when he attempted to broadcast a critique of Sandro Castro, grandson of Fidel, following his interview with CNN.
The segment was blocked, and Torres Corona posted the excerpt 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 his support for capitalism.
For the author, both characters—El Cangrejo and el Vampiro—represent the same contradiction: they are offspring of revolutionary power that collide, consciously or not, 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 broken rank this week from within the official environment.
The singer-songwriter Israel Rojas publicly apologized on Wednesday for being "naive" in 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 "shut up" Raúl's grandson.
The establishment responded quickly. On Thursday, the PCC official Elier Ramírez Cañedo stepped up to defend El Cangrejo as «the interlocutor on the Cuban side, by decision of the country’s highest leadership», and on Friday, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero accused critics of executing «a well-designed plan to create uncertainty and distrust», labeling the criticisms as «character assassinations».
The fact that Torres Corona—a host from the official media outlet—turns to a Uruguayan portal to ask questions that Cuban television prohibits him from raising is, in itself, a symptom of the fractures that the figure of El Cangrejo has created even among those who defend the system: "What justifies his impunity?" is the question that the article leaves without an official answer.
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