by Frances Martel
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,” an 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.”