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The Cuban writer and researcher Sayli Alba Álvarez published a powerful text on Facebook addressed to Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as El Cangrejo, in which she reminds him that his luxuries stand in stark contrast to the hunger, heat, and despair of millions of Cubans.
The message from Alba Álvarez on Facebook comes in the midst of an unprecedented week of criticism sparked by the first interview of Raúl Castro's grandson with a U.S. media outlet, published on July 6 in USA Today, in which he offered to negotiate with President Donald Trump, while appearing dressed in Hugo Boss clothes, Hermès sneakers, and a Rolex Submariner.
"I only remind you that behind your luxuries and beneath your sneakers is a hungry people, suffering from heat and without hope, who can no longer endure. I wish someone would tell you this," wrote the author, originally from Sancti Spíritus.
Alba not only pointed out the contrast between the privileges of El Cangrejo and the popular misery; she also expressed alarm about the collapse of Cuban banks, which she confirmed through a journalist from Sancti Spíritus, and about the lack of water, electricity, and food that state workers are suffering.
"I am worried about not having access to money and that it is already a fact that the Cuban banks have collapsed," he wrote, adding that it troubles him that "there is no discourse that represents the people" nor an official from the State Council who "speaks in their own words" and identifies with the people's pain.
The writer also references the phrase that El Cangrejo uttered in his interview, "It hurts me that many people cannot live like I do," interpreting it as an involuntary confession.
"He made it clear that he, that they, are not part of the people, and I only see a lot of hypocrisy in those words and an immense pain from this side," he argued.
In her text, Alba also recalled Sandro Castro, the grandson of the dictator Fidel Castro (2016-2026), who went viral for being seen bathing in beer.
"Sandro Castro bathed in the beer that we cannot drink," he wrote, noting that "we have already gotten over our astonishment" from that episode and that now a new figure from the elite is stepping into the spotlight.
The voice of the writer joins a series of critical reactions that include the singer-songwriter Israel Rojas, who publicly apologized for being "naive" for not believing the allegations about the privileges of the elite for many years.
Moreover, the comedian Ulises Toirac summarized the informal power of El Cangrejo with a phrase: "A single slap of yours on a table knocks over more glasses than anyone else's slap."
The presenter and propagandist of the regime, Michel Torres Corona, alsolashed out against El Cangrejo in an extensive text in a Uruguayan media outlet, where he vented and acknowledged what the official Cuban television prevents him from saying on screen.
The regime responded through Prime Minister Manuel Marrero, who accused critics of implementing "a well-designed plan to generate uncertainty and distrust," while the PCC official Elier Ramírez Cañedo defended the most favored grandson of Raúl Castro as "the interlocutor on the Cuban side, by decision of the highest leadership of the country."
This is not the first time that Alba Álvarez has raised her voice. In June, she published a viral post in which she questioned the rationale of working in Cuba for a salary of 5,000 pesos when a bag of charcoal costs 4,200 pesos and a bottle of oil costs 1,800 pesos.
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