Madrid/The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has held secret conversations with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known on the island as ‘El Cangrejo’, Raúl Castro’s favorite grandson, as revealed by three sources from the US Administration to Axios.
“I wouldn’t call this ‘negotiations,’ but rather ‘discussions’ about the future,” said a senior Trump administration official.
The media maintains that the contacts make it clear that Washington considers Raúl Castro as the true head of the regime, although there are still doubts about how the situation will play out.
“Our position — that of the US government — is that the regime has to go,” the senior official told Axios, “but exactly what that will look like is up to President Trump and he hasn’t decided yet. Rubio is still in talks with his grandson.”
Earlier this month, the Spanish newspaper ABC stated that according to sources in Mexico, the mediator of the US talks with Cuba was the son of former president General Alejandro Castro Espín. However, the American media points to the current citizen of the elderly Castro as chosen.
“She is the apple of her grandfather’s eye, she served as his bodyguard and has allies running the gigantic military-business conglomerate known as Gaesa”
“She is the apple of her grandfather’s eye, she served as his bodyguard and has allies running the gigantic military-business conglomerate known as Gaesa,” said one of the sources.
Rodríguez Castro is the son of the late Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, executive president of the group – as well as a deputy – until his deathin the summer of 2022, due to a heart attack. He yernie de Castro had been identified until that moment as one of the possible replacements for a Díaz-Canel who has never enjoyed sympathy.
The talks between Rubio and Castro are “surprisingly” friendly according to Axios’ sources. “There are no political diatribes about the past. It’s about the future,” he said, adding that, despite everything – including the age difference, since Castro is 41 years old – there is a lot of shared culture between them.
“Raulito could have come straight from Hialeah. It could be a conversation between regular guys on the streets of Miami,” the source added.
According to Axios, Rubio and his team see Castro’s grandson and his circle as representatives of a generation of younger, business-minded Cubans for whom revolutionary communism has failed and who see value in a rapprochement with the United States. The Secretary of State, for his part, considers Díaz-Canel a apparatchik of the party incapable of negotiating changes.
The information adds that, although everything is speculation, a possible agreement could exempt members of the Castro family from exile, including the former president, although the decision would be complicated to make, due to the impact it could have on the Cuban community in Miami.
The information adds that, although everything is speculation, a possible agreement could exempt members of the Castro family from exile, including the former president.
This Monday, Donald Trump insisted that there are talks between the Cuban regime and his government, led by Rubio, although Havana has systematically denied them. The head of the US Embassy in Cuba, Mike Hammer, even hinted in an interview that Díaz-Canel was not even aware of that dialogue, but his Executive reiterates that they are malicious insinuations to generate division.
“We are talking to Cuba right now. Marco Rubio is talking to Cuba right now, and they should totally come to an agreement, because it is… really a humanitarian threat,” he said aboard the presidential plane.
Rubio, for his part, said Saturday in an interview with Bloomberg that “the fundamental problem” of the island is that “it has no economy” and that its leaders “do not know how to improve the daily life of their population without ceding power in the sectors they control.”
“It is important for the people of Cuba to have more freedom, not only political freedom, but also economic freedom (…) I really think that their willingness (of the Cuban Government) to begin an opening in this aspect is a potential path forward.”
