Cardboard Castro: The Auction of a Nation's Future

The scene is both absurd and revealing: Cubans posing cheerfully beside a rejuvenated, artificially intelligent version of dictator Fidel Castro, now a fairground attraction at a regime propaganda event.

A "selfie" with the past; a portrait with a specter. Cuba is forced to look back while its future is decided out of sight, away from public scrutiny, and most importantly, without the voice of its own people, who remain silenced, oppressed, and starving.

This cardboard version of Castro epitomizes the current state of Castrismo: a hollow image endlessly replicated to sustain a narrative that no longer aligns with reality. While the ideological machinery clings to the rituals of the so-called "revolution," real power in Cuba operates in a different dimension—one driven by interests, negotiations, and the survival of an elite.

The Illusion of Political Transition

For decades, the regime presented itself as a political and ideological project. Today, that facade is cracking. What emerges is not a "revolution" in crisis but a recognizable entity: a family power structure managing the country like a private estate. Cuba is not a republic in transition; it's an estate undergoing reorganization.

In this framework, formal institutions and their puppets—the presidency, the government, the Party, Díaz-Canel, and others—act as grotesque props.

Power Behind the Scenes

Real power remains concentrated within the Castro entourage and the military-business complex, which controls strategic economic sectors, with GAESA as its backbone. Decisions are made there, wealth is managed, and the future is determined.

What we're witnessing is not the end of the system but its transformation. Castrismo is evolving, shedding epic rhetoric for a more pragmatic approach: a kleptocracy seeking self-preservation.

It's no longer about spreading ideology but about protecting assets, ensuring continuity, and adapting to a new context while retaining control.

A New Generation of Power

In this "damage control" process, a new generation of the clan begins to occupy key spaces. Some operate in the shadows as intermediaries or handlers of sensitive relations.

Examples include El Tuerto (Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín) in his panopticon of repressive and intelligence services, and El Cangrejo (Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro), the grandson bodyguard of Raúl, enjoying life in Hialeah with Makarov, delivering punches and letters.

Others rise within formal structures with a technocratic profile, like the "good" Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, presented with all his surnames to prove he's not a Castro, but a logistics star emerging spontaneously from the slums of Siboney.

Some are more visible, projecting a public image that combines provocation, luxury, and ideological ambiguity, like the trendy entrepreneur, the "prince of darkness and king of the night" interviewed by CNN and NBC, the "young revolutionary" fed differently than the "new man," half-witted opener, Sandro Castro.

These are not isolated actors but parts of the same mechanism: the familial continuity of power.

Shadows of Negotiation

Simultaneously, there are growing signs—nebulous, opaque, yet persistent—of contacts with the United States. These are not formal negotiations but tentative approaches, exploratory conversations, discreet channels: backchannels learned from the KGB in its transition to the FSB, maneuvering on the 5D chessboard of the Trump administration.

The significance lies not in their exact content but in their logic: Washington talks to those it deems capable of making decisions, and these do not appear to be the visible institutional representatives of the Cuban state.

This interaction, real or potential, unveils an uncomfortable truth: power in Cuba has never been fully institutional. It has always been mediated by networks of loyalty, control, and access, where the family and military apparatus have played a decisive role. Today, amid a profound crisis, that power seeks to reposition itself.

Propaganda and Control

But the strategy is not linear. As channels to the outside open, the regime intensifies its internal narrative. Propaganda multiplies, the cult of the past is reinforced, and the myth of the "revolution" and its supposed social project is insisted upon.

This is not nostalgia; it's control. It's the tool that keeps a battered society cohesive while power balances are reconfigured.

The goal seems clear: negotiate without conceding the narrative, adapt without dismantling the system, change what is necessary so that nothing essential changes. An internally managed transition, where the same actors—or their heirs—retain the fundamental levers of political and economic power.

The closest precedent is not in Latin America but in Eastern Europe. Post-Soviet Russia showed how a system can transform without disappearing: repressive structures recycle, elites become oligarchies, and power recentralizes under new forms. There is no rupture, only transformed continuity.

Cuba might be approaching a similar scenario. A "transition" not born of popular will but of elite agreements. A redesign of the system where economic openness coexists with political control. A recomposition in which the nation does not participate but is an object of negotiation.

And therein lies the fundamental problem. Because all this occurs behind the backs of Cubans, with Silvios demanding machine guns and Marreros advocating "creative resistances" amidst feasts and rancheras. Without shame, without transparency, without debate, without legitimacy. The country does not decide its fate; others do it for them. As if it were a commodity. As if it were, indeed, an inherited property.

That is why the selfie image is not anecdotal. It is profoundly symbolic. While citizens pose with a cardboard Fidel, smiling and frozen in time, the real country—impoverished, exhausted, fragmented—moves in another direction. A direction marked by undeclared interests and unexplained agreements.

For years, the talk was of "revolution." Today, what remains is its wrapper, a bloodstained, foul-smelling shroud. Behind, something else emerges: the administration of an inheritance, the management of a patrimony, the continuity of a power that never ceased to be private.

Cuba is not freeing itself from its past. It is witnessing how that past changes shape to continue ruling. And while the regime offers selfies with ghosts, its heirs quietly advance, auctioning off the nation.