‘The majority of Cubans want to be capitalist’: Why Fidel Castro’s influencer grandson is for a deal with Trump

(CNN) — If the Castros are – as some Cubans refer to them – “the royal family” of the island, then Sandro Castro seems to be applying for the role of court jester.

In a country where regular access to the internet is still considered a luxury, Cuban nightclub owner Sandro Castro – a grandson to deceased leader Fidel Castro – has amassed over 150,000 followers on Instagram with outrageous and often bizarre antics that appear like an audition for an inevitable reality show about a wastrel heir to a revolutionary dynasty.

Think “One Hundred Years of Solitude” meets “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”

Unlike the rest of his intensely private, often secretive, relatives, Sandro openly seeks out fame and notoriety, even daring to troll the island’s communist-run government.

But in an exclusive late-night visit interview during one of the frequent blackouts roiling the island, the 33-year-old told CNN that he is misunderstood.

“I am making videos about a tense, sad situation,” Castro said referring to rising tensions between the island and the Trump administration that have further hastened Cuba’s economic collapse.

“At least I am trying to make people happy,” Castro says. “To get a smile from them. I would never make fun of a situation that I suffer from as well.

A life of privilege in Cuba

Castro’s posts offer a rare peek into a life of privilege unimaginable to most Cubans while taking the occasional swipes at the communist apparatchiks who succeeded his grandfather, who died in 2016, and great uncle Raúl, who stood down as president in 2018.

A recent Instagram video featured an actor with bad wig askew pretending to be Donald Trump arriving on Castro’s doorstep and attempting to buy Cuba from him.

“We can do business because you are a showman and businessman like me,” the fake Trump tells the real Castro.

“You want to buy what!?” Castro responds. “Chill out!”

Poking fun at Trump’s threat to take over Cuba and the country’s worsening economic crisis would seem tone deaf if not dangerous in a nation that has warned its citizens they need to prepare for war.

It’s hard to imagine anyone not named Castro getting away with a similar stunt.

But Sandro Castro said he is just like many other Cubans, fed up with the country’s direction.

“It’s so difficult,” Castro said of the worsening crisis that has driven some Cubans to protest against the government and others to search dumpsters for food.

“You suffer thousands of problems. In a day, there might not be electricity, no water. Goods don’t arrive. It’s so hard, really hard,” Castro told me, as his manager handed him another ice-cold beer.

It was night, but he was wearing designer sunglasses for our interview at his apartment in the secluded Kohly neighborhood of Havana, where many Cuban military and intelligence officials live.

‘The outrage gets the likes’

Amid an island-wide energy crisis, debate over how much Castro is really suffering as he downs chilled Cuban Cristal beers and powers his modern looking bachelor pad with an EcoFlow battery generator will likely only deepen controversy around a scion of Cuba’s most famous family. Castro claims he is not “Dubai-rich,” that his family does not own mansions or yachts and says he does not even have gas to put in his car. But in a country where the average salary is below $20 per month, Castro seems to be doing more than OK for himself. Even as Cuba’s economy collapses, on social media, for Castro and pals, the party never stops.

He is perhaps the rarest figure in Cuba; someone who unites the two political extremes that have been battling over the future of the nation for nearly 70 years in their shared disdain for him.

For Cuban exiles who fled the 1959 revolution, he is a symbol of rank hypocrisy, one of the descendants of a communist leader who outlawed private industry for decades and advocated for austerity, but who themselves enjoy the fruits of capitalism.

For die-hard supporters of the Cuban revolution, he is a proletariat class traitor, cashing in on his revolutionary lineage for clicks and likes.

“He’s trading on ‘hate me,’” said Ted Henken, a sociology and anthropology professor at Baruch College in New York who has studied the spread of the internet in Cuba. “The Kardashians and Paris Hilton and him, they are also trading on this envy or ‘look at my fabulous lifestyle.’”

“You can’t look away,” he said. “The outrage gets the likes, gets the followers.”

Castro denies that he is a millionaire and rejects the possibility that his family connections protect him or make his life any easier than that of other Cubans. His nightclub on a main avenue of Havana “only” cost him $50,000, he said – a sum beyond the wildest imagination of most Cubans.

“The little I have is thanks to my effort, my sacrifice,” he said.

Does it help to be a Castro in Cuba? “My name is my name. I am proud of my name logically. But I don’t see this help you are talking about. I am just one more citizen,” he said.

During the interview, Castro also wondered aloud how he could get a visa to the US to “visit friends in Miami” and apologized for his rudimentary English.

“It’s like Maduro’s,” he said with a mischievous smile, referring to the Venezuelan leader seized by the US in January.

‘The majority of Cubans want to be capitalist’

Sandro Castro is one of the grandsons of Fidel Castro and Dalia Soto del Valle, reportedly a school teacher from the center of the island, who quietly lived with the Cuban leader for decades.

The couple had five sons together, Alexis, Alex, Alejandro, Antonio and Angel. Fidel Castro, either wanting to protect his family’s privacy or maintain the mystique of a revolutionary who only had time for his country, never publicly disclosed the family.

Alexis Castro Soto del Valle, Sandro’s father and a telecommunications engineer, has also dabbled in social media. He has posted on X memories of his childhood in the famous family, as well as veiled criticism of the Cuban government’s recent economic decisions.

But in 2024, Alexis Castro posted he was taking “a digital detox” and stopped posting on his X account. Sandro was on the phone with his father preparing talking points when CNN arrived to speak with him.

There are no signs though that Sandro Castro has any intention of slowing his barrage of videos, even though he admitted to CNN that his family sometimes asks him to remove his controversial posts where he has mocked blackouts and fuel shortages.

“I am just kidding around,” he said, even though pro-government bloggers have called for his arrest.

He told CNN he wants to produce his own beer and buy more nightclubs and cars but is frustrated by the red tape that surrounds all commerce in Cuba as result of the system his grandfather put into place.

“We have to open the economic model, eliminate the bureaucracy,” he complained, without irony.

“I am a revolutionary, but a revolutionary of ideas, of progress, of change,” he said, referencing current Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel’s slogan of “continuity.”

“I would not say he is doing a good job. For me, he is not doing a good job,” Castro said of Diaz-Canel, who is the first Cuban head of state not named Castro since the revolution and has enjoyed the vocal support of both Raul and Fidel Castro over the years.

Sandro Castro said his videos and critiques of the system have led to Cuban State Security calling him in for questioning. He was let go with just a warning, he said, not because of his famous last name, but since he has never called for violence or regime change.

While praising his grandfather Fidel and great-uncle Raul, Sandro Castro refused to say if the revolution they led had improved life on the island.

“I was born after 1959, so I can’t say,” he said.

He was more outspoken on how a deal with Trump could revolutionize the island’s economy. In his latest video satire, he presents the actor playing the US president with a “Trump” tower hotel rising high over the Havana skyline.

“There are many people in Cuba that think in a capitalistic way. There are many people here who want to do capitalism with sovereignty,” he said.

“I think the majority of Cubans want to be capitalist, not communist,” Castro said.

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