Cuba’s Worst ‘New Man’: With a Luxury Car, a Powerful Surname and Little Education

Sandro Castro, Fidel’s grandson. (Instagram)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 2 March 2021 — He alternates his gaze between the road and the camera recording him. He smiles. He flaunts the luxurious vehicle that he drives at high speed and tosses phrases at a spectator he assumes must be salivating at such luxury. The protagonist of this scene could be any Parisian, New York or Berlin influencer, but he is a young Cuban who was born cocooned by the most powerful surname on the Island. He is Sandro Castro.

Few are surprised by the opulent Mercedes Benz driven by the grandson of the one who imposed on us, by force of slogans and economic offensives, austerity as a standard. Nor is the speedometer needle surprising, as it marks the excessive speed with which the tires cover the asphalt. None of the obscene attributes of power that the young man boasts about are shocking to a people who, for a long time, have known that the sacrifice their leaders proclaim from the platform are an entirely different thing than the wealth of their palaces.

The most unprecedented thing, then, is not the car nor the speeding, but the way the bully speaks behind the steering wheel. Each phrase he pronounces shows him to be a person consumed by consumption, fascinated by the material, with very little education, a minimal vocabulary, and a great need to flaunt his wealth. Is this the “New Man” incubated in the same clan that sent us to schools in the countryside, treated us like serious soldiers, and forced us to renounce our individuality? Is he the son of the son of the man who always loved us humble and obedient?

[Twitter text: This video of Sandro Castro comes while hunger is rampant in Cuba, after #PatriaYVida and the letter from the military officers.  Who leaked the video and why?]

Was everything they took from us dedicated to raising these arrogant beings, who have not even used their wealth to read books, to cultivate or expand their narrow referential horizons? Are the grandchildren of those who came down from the Sierra Maestra continuing to be like their great-grandfather, the peasant from Birán – despotic and conceited – but now with mansions in Havana, absolute impunity and privileges unattainable for other Cubans? Have they spent part of this country’s resources to support these capricious and rude brats? Was it all for this?

Children should never have to pay for the guilt of their parents, much less their grandparents, but each person exhibits in their behavior much of the ethical and moral values taught to them by their family. A person’s home  is noticeable in the first sentences, the education received – whether from the poorest of bricklayers or the most devoted of seamstresses – sprouts from every pore. What emanates from Sandro Castro allows us to see, as in a detailed X-ray, the skeleton of the Cuban regime, and it reeks.

The lineage that should have been the model to follow, proclaimed every day as the example, has only borne rotten fruits: empty-headed pimps.

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