The theme park that Cuba seems to be for people like Spanish politician Pablo Iglesias and so many others who beat their chests and claim to speak for Cubans has opened its doors. Profiting from others’ suffering might have limits imposed by ethics and shame, but there is everything in the flotilla that has landed on the island except that. Everything except solidarity. Everything except respect. There is, however, plenty of opportunism, brazenness, insolence, and cynicism.

While the delegation—beaming with happiness at spending a few days in the “Caribbean socialist bastion”—settles into luxury rooms likely lit by generators or solar panels, every building around that hotel, every home, every clinic, and every school is in darkness. And not a single one of them questions why.

Meanwhile, the National Electric System shut down for the seventh time in a year and a half. Yet the flotilla did not feel it. Did they even know?

The image is simple: these people who did not have to go to the island to send donations—and who, by the way, could have sent them much earlier without making so much noise—trample every Cuban who today has no electricity. They stand atop the ruins of the country to gaze in awe at the landscape of disaster, pat each other on the back, and convince themselves of the absurd lie and the disaster they themselves are helping to stage.

Activists from CODEPINK, including cofounder Medea Benjamin, kneeling at center, and others hold signs as part of the “Nuestra América” convoy after landing at Havana airport, Cuba, on Friday, March 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Ramón Espinosa)

From up there, all they do is tell the Cubans below to keep resisting because they need them for causes that do not align with what they claim to defend. They need the Cuban people to be martyrs incapable of escaping their reality—docile, obedient martyrs with visible blood and bodies shattered by the imperialist power—so they can approach them, watch them agonize, measure their breathing, and not lift a finger to stop that degradation with the moral clarity that, if they had it, would place them on the opposite side of the dictatorship.

A delegation with signs and suitcases bought in ferocious capitalism jumps and shouts, with a joy that is really mockery, “socialism is what we want”; they carry heart-shaped signs reading “down with the blockade,” wear spotless white T-shirts with the phrase “Cuba is not alone.” They meet with an emotional Diaz-Canel in a jacket and shirt, and there is light—lots of light—in every place they go, and there is fuel to power it; they stay in hotels from which, of course, it seems that things on the island are not as bad as they were told.

But I have not seen them sleep in a house completely in darkness, swatting away mosquitoes and fear. I have not seen them help cook with charcoal—only in staged gardens they are taken to so they can exhaust their desire to “contribute.” I have not seen them in a single place where they truly should have been.

It is obvious that they have no idea what they are shouting, nor of the privileges they enjoy, nor of the ridicule and harm they are causing in this macabre game of amusing themselves with the real needs of Cubans. Or they do know and still have the audacity to revel in others’ suffering. People who would not stay in Cuba for a moment to enjoy the much-proclaimed “socialism,” with zero freedoms and zero prosperity, are nothing but liars.

That desire to perpetuate Cuba’s sinking, to applaud the oppressor, to sit at his table, eat, and smile at him, is the act that in one stroke turns their back to an enslaved people.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel delivers a welcome speech to convoy participants at the Convention Center in Havana, Cuba, on Friday, March 20, 2026. (Adalberto Roque/Pool Photo via AP)

A flotilla that lets loose at the Pabellon Cuba event venue, laughing out loud, enjoying disco lights, overwhelmed with joy by the mere fact of being there, unaware, they are with the power elite. People who are happy and in agreement with flying a group of rappers to the island just for them to enjoy in that closed space, while the people they came to “help” cannot even get in—assuming they had anything to celebrate or the energy to jump around and shout “down with the blockade.”

People who dance as only those can who have slept and eaten well, whose lives are secure, who travel and then return to their home countries from which they can continue to vilify the dignity of Cubans. Only someone without the worry of survival can do that.

People who want to become the story themselves, who obstruct and take up more and more space from those who need it, who help silence those who protest; people who casually trivialize Gaza by comparing it to Cuba and vice versa. People who now, with Trump in the equation, have suddenly turned their gaze toward Cuba and want the rest of the world to do so only through their lens.

For many years now, Cubans have been suffering a humanitarian crisis without any of those in the flotilla noticing, it seems. For decades, the Cuban regime has been burying alive the inhabitants of a country that is falling apart. Cuba does not need to be looked at—it needs to be listened to. And Cubans—the ones who shout “freedom” and “down with Diaz-Canel” at every protest—are not heard; they are erased because they are inconvenient and tarnish the revolutionary image.

There are several videos that provoke such anger. They make it almost impossible to think of any justification that would absolve the flotilla members of complicity. Videos showing them happy aboard the buses transporting them while the entire country is paralyzed. On those buses they toured parts of the capital and were taken to their parties; they very likely raised their phones to photograph the Cubans they found lying in the very places where the government has abandoned them. It is a safari of misery. It is the ultimate disrespect one human being can show another—looking down from a privileged height and documenting them as if they were in a zoo.

Flotilla members on their revolutionary tour while public transportation for Cubans is paralyzed.

Tomorrow, the flotilla’s donations will run out. And it will be the Cuban regime—not the blockade nor Trump—that will be unable to provide, because it is the real problem. Nor will it allow people to provide for themselves. It will end up hoarding both the gains and the souls of everyone. The solution to Cubans’ misery does not lie in the supposed solidarity of those who have done nothing but wallow in ideological mud. Cuba’s solution lies in freedom—in breaking the chains of dictatorship.



This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.