Cuban dissidents and human rights activists reacted with shock and disgust this weekend at the arrival of the “Nuestra America” convoy, a cohort of international celebrity leftists visiting the island to show solidarity with the 67-year-old communist regime.
The “Nuestra America” convoy features the participation of several American leftist agitator groups, including Codepink and the “People’s Forum,” and activists group that, the Breitbart News Foundation (BNF) reported in October, has received millions of dollars in donations from tech billionaire and leftist agitator Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Codepink co-founder Jodie Evans.
Prominent former politicians visiting Cuba for the occasion include British former Labor Party leader and current lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn, People’s Forum chief agitator Manolo de los Santos, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)’s daughter Isra Hirsi, widely despised leftist “streamer” personality Hasan Piker, and Pablo Iglesias, the former head of the Spanish Marxist political party Podemos and a former television host on Iranian propaganda network HispanTV.
Cuba’s figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has no power independent of 94-year-old dictator Raúl Castro, welcomed the Marxist VIPs to the island on Friday.
Cubans trapped in the communist system expressed offense and revulsion at the arrival of the Western socialists as Cuban state media promoted their arrival. Yoani Sánchez, a longtime dissident journalist and editor of the independent outlet 14 y Medio, declared in a post on social media, “We are not a theme park. Go do ideological tourism somewhere else. We are suffering here.”
Sánchez, who has for years documented and criticized the horrors of socialism in the country, was personally placed on temporary house arrest last week as protests demanding an end to Castro family rule pervaded the island. Her outlet nonetheless covered the arrival of the convoy, observing that it “left clear to what point the country today depends on foreign aid to alleviate basic shortages, despite presenting itself for decades as a moral, medical, and political power on the continent.”
Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morúa, the president of the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba, told the U.S.-based Martí Noticias outlet that the convoy’s behavior was a form of “racism.”
“A certain part of the global left has historically behaved towards Cuba with double racism,” he explained. “The racism of considering us noble savages who need to be helped … and the racism of continuing to support a revolution that has deliberately created the worst conditions of life.”
Cuesta Morúa highlighted the fact that many of Cuba’s most impoverished people, and its most violently subjugated dissidents, were Afro-Cubans, a fact often obscured by leftist pro-Castro propaganda.
“They don’t want Cubans to live like them,” he emphasized, referring to the “caviar left.”
In a comment highlighted on Saturday by Martí Noticias, Amnesty International investigator Johanna Cilano reacted to the leftist voyage to Cuba with “much pain, loneliness, and frustration.”
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“It is hard to separate the aid, which is much needed today, with the political circus behind this event,” she continued. “Difficult to think about any genuine concern with so much complicity, frivolity, and embraces of the oppressor.”
Commentary from Pablo Iglesias on social media triggered another wave of outrage from Cuban dissidents, as he claimed that the situation on the island “is not what is being presented from outside.”
“There are over 1,000 political prisoners … blackouts, water shortages, gas [shortages], food [shortages],” reacted activist Ariel Maceo Téllez, accusing Iglesias and his cohort of seeking to “profit from the pain of the Cuban people.”
Others dismissed his commentary outright given his stay at a luxury tourist hotel in Havana, one Cuban citizens cannot afford or access.
According to the “Nuestra America” group, the personalities are bringing “critical humanitarian aid” to Cuba in response to President Donald Trump’s actions against global repressive communism, which they claim are “strangling the island.” The “Nuestra America” website does not appear to recognize any responsibility on the part of Fidel Castro, his ruling dynasty, or the Communist Party for the decades of torture, beatings, disappearances, firing squad executions, malnutrition, lack of access to medical care, or other indignities the Cuban people have suffered for over a century.
The group staged an event for its participants in Havana on Saturday – a concert featuring the leftist Irish group Kneecap, which baffled observers given the lack of access to electricity for regular Cubans on the island currently.
The Communist Party acknowledged a nationwide blackout Saturday into Sunday. First Viceminister of Energy and Mines Argelio Jesús Abad Vigoa issued a statement declaring that the Party has “exhausted the possibility of producing electricity.” Keen observers in Havana noted that the Spanish-owned Hotel Gran Bristol Meliá, identified in several reports as the lodging site of some of the wealthiest and most prominent members of the “Nuestra America” convoy, did not appear to lose electricity during the nationwide blackout.
At least one member of the “convoy,” the leftist “streamer” Hasan Piker, attempted to address the luxurious accommodations that the group had chosen in Havana.
“The United States government literally has made it illegal for Americans to stay wherever they want in Cuba,” Piker claimed. “They have to stay in what they’ve declared as a five-star hotel, right?”
Piker complained that the “five-star hotel” was “not like, you know” – implying that it was not luxurious, adding, “but regardless, in comparison to the situation on the island, it’s prosperity pretty much, and experiencing that dichotomy has definitely fucked me up.”
In reality, there is no American law that bans Americans from staying in locations in Cuba that are not five-star hotels. What Piker appeared to be referring to is a ban by the U.S. government on Americans spending money in hotels and other lodgings “owned or controlled by the Cuban government, a prohibited official of the Government of Cuba,” or other such entity.
The ban only prevents Americans from giving money directly to the Castro regime that would then be used to repress the Cuban people or support terrorist entities. Cuba is a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism for its close relationship to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Hezbollah, the Iranian terror state, and other such entities.
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