While international leftists partied at a Havana concert and bedded down in a five-star hotel, Cuba's electrical grid collapsed and the island went dark. The dissidents who live under the Castro regime's boot had a message for their uninvited guests: go home.
"We are not a theme park. Go do ideological tourism somewhere else. We are suffering here." That was Yoani Sánchez, the dissident journalist who edits the independent outlet 14 y Medio. She posted those words on social media as the so-called "Nuestra America" convoy rolled into Havana with cameras, slogans, and what it called "critical humanitarian aid."
The convoy, a collection of Western leftists, progressive organizations, and socialist fellow travelers, arrived in Cuba over the weekend, welcomed personally on Friday by Miguel Díaz-Canel, the island's nominal president who serves at the pleasure of 94-year-old dictator Raúl Castro. As Breitbart News reported, the group staged an event Saturday in Havana featuring a concert by the band Kneecap. The guest list read like a who's who of the international socialist circuit: former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Spanish Podemos founder Pablo Iglesias, streamer Hasan Piker, Codepink activists, and Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
The timing could hardly have been worse for the convoy's optics. Or better for exposing its absurdity.
Saturday night into Sunday, Cuba's Communist Party acknowledged a nationwide blackout. First Viceminister of Energy and Mines Argelio Jesús Abad Vigoa issued a blunt statement: the country had "exhausted the possibility of producing electricity." The entire island went dark.
The entire island, that is, except apparently the Hotel Gran Bristol Meliá in Havana, the five-star lodging where several of the convoy's wealthiest and most prominent members were staying. Fox News reported that some delegates stayed at the Gran Hotel Bristol Meliá Collection and similar resorts while Cuba faced blackouts and shortages. Keen observers noted the hotel did not appear to lose electricity during the blackout, a detail that landed like a slap among Cubans enduring the crisis.
So picture it: Western socialists sipping drinks in air-conditioned comfort while ordinary Cubans sat in the dark, unable to refrigerate food or pump water. This is the revolution in practice. The party leaders and their foreign admirers keep the lights on. Everyone else suffers.
The convoy's organizers framed the trip as a mercy mission. They claimed to be delivering "critical humanitarian aid" in response to President Donald Trump's actions against global repressive communism, which they said were "strangling the island." The group's website, according to reporting, does not appear to recognize any responsibility on the part of Fidel Castro, his ruling dynasty, or the Communist Party for Cuba's 67-year record of poverty, repression, and collapse.
That framing, blame America, excuse the dictatorship, drew furious responses from Cubans who know better.
Manuel Cuesta Morúa, president of the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba, told Martí Noticias that the convoy's behavior amounted to racism. Not the kind of racism the Western left typically obsesses over. Something more insidious.
"A certain part of the global left has historically behaved towards Cuba with double racism. 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 drove the point home: "They don't want Cubans to live like them." The Western leftists demand socialism for Cuba while enjoying capitalism's comforts at home. They fly in on sponsored trips, stay in luxury hotels, and fly out again, leaving Cubans to cope with the wreckage of the system they champion.
Johanna Cilano, an investigator for Amnesty International, described the convoy's arrival as a source of "much pain, loneliness, and frustration" for Cubans. Martí Noticias highlighted her comments on Saturday.
"It is hard to separate the aid, which is much needed today, with the political circus behind this event. Difficult to think about any genuine concern with so much complicity, frivolity, and embraces of the oppressor."
Activist Ariel Maceo Téllez was blunter. He catalogued the reality the convoy's participants seemed eager to ignore: "There are over 1,000 political prisoners... blackouts, water shortages, gas shortages, food shortages." He accused Iglesias and his cohort of seeking to "profit from the pain of the Cuban people."
Iglesias, the former Podemos chief and one-time host on Iran's HispanTV network, posted on social media that the situation on the island "is not what is being presented from outside." He did not elaborate on which part, the blackouts, the political prisoners, or the food lines, was being misrepresented.
Sánchez, the journalist who called out the convoy, had been placed on temporary house arrest just last week as protests demanding an end to Castro family rule swept the island. The regime's response to dissent remains the same as it has been for decades: silence the critics, then invite foreign sympathizers to validate the system. It is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Codepink's co-founder recruit Americans for trips to Red China while Congress demands answers on the organization's ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Piker, the streamer, attempted to address the hotel controversy. His explanation was a masterclass in deflection. "The United States government literally has made it illegal for Americans to stay wherever they want in Cuba," he told his followers. "They have to stay in what they've declared as a five-star hotel, right?"
That claim deserves scrutiny. The U.S. Department of State does maintain a list of prohibited accommodations in Cuba, properties "owned or controlled by the Cuban government, a prohibited official of the Government of Cuba," or similar entities. The ban prevents Americans from spending money at those specific lodgings. But Piker's suggestion that U.S. law forced the delegation into five-star luxury is, at best, a creative reading of the sanctions regime. He seemed to acknowledge the awkwardness himself, admitting that "in comparison to the situation on the island, it's prosperity pretty much, and experiencing that dichotomy has definitely fucked me up."
One might ask: if the dichotomy bothered him so much, why go at all? Why stage a concert and a propaganda tour while Cubans can't keep the lights on?
The organizations behind the convoy tell part of the story. Codepink and the People's Forum were among the participating groups. The People's Forum, led by chief agitator Manolo de los Santos, received millions of dollars in donations from tech billionaire Neville Roy Singham and Codepink co-founder Jodie Evans, as the Breitbart News Foundation reported in October. Cuba is a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism for its close relationships with FARC, Hezbollah, and the Iranian terror state. The convoy's participants chose to embrace that regime anyway, and to do so while a broader pattern of extremist sympathies among socialist-aligned figures draws increasing public attention.
The convoy was never really about humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid doesn't require a concert, a five-star hotel, or a Friday greeting from the dictator's front man. The convoy was about giving Western leftists a chance to perform solidarity with a communist regime while blaming the United States for the regime's failures.
The playbook is old. Blame the embargo. Blame Washington. Blame Trump. Never blame the system that jails dissidents, collapses its own power grid, and can't feed its people after nearly seven decades of one-party rule. Western progressives have a long track record of aggressive activism paired with selective outrage, loud about American policy, silent about the regimes they prop up.
Cuesta Morúa nailed it when he called it "double racism." The convoy members see Cubans not as people with agency, dignity, and the right to self-governance, but as props in a political narrative. The suffering is useful. The dissidents are inconvenient. The blackout is someone else's fault.
And when the weekend ends, the Western leftists will board their flights home, back to functioning electrical grids, stocked grocery stores, and the freedom to criticize their own governments without being thrown under house arrest. The Cubans they claim to champion will stay behind, in the dark, waiting for the next convoy of strangers to tell them how good they have it.
That's the thing about ideological tourism. The tourists always get to leave.
