Several progressive activists, including political Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, climate activist Greta Thunberg and the daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Isra Hirsi, traveled to Cuba last Friday to protest U.S. embargoes.
In a series of social media posts, the activist visitors, who came with 20 tons of humanitarian aid, largely blamed the country’s decline on U.S. embargoes, citing the U.S. as the cause of Cuba’s deterioration.
The trip has raised quite the stir online.
Currently, and for the last 66 years, most trade is banned between the U.S. and Cuba, with U.S. exports heavily restricted.
Embargoes on Cuba are nothing new. President Dwight Eisenhower originally imposed them in 1960 when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro nationalized U.S. property, and President John F. Kennedy formalized them during the Cold War. For the next six decades, they have continued through every president. In the 1990s, an embargo was codified by Congress.
As Piker and other delegates of the “Nuestra America Convoy” posted videos of their trip, large swathes of the internet responded with scrutiny. Reports emerged that the 34-year-old streamer and others stayed in a five-star hotel, Iberostar Marques de la Torre, as the rest of the country experienced massive power outages.
On Saturday, Cuba faced its third nationwide blackout of the month. These outages have become increasingly common in the last several years, as the country’s electrical grid has “drastically eroded,” The Associated Press reported.
A White House fact sheet from late January reasoned the embargoes are necessary to “hold the Cuban regime accountable for its support of hostile actors, terrorism and regional instability that endanger American security and foreign policy.”
Specifically, Cuba spreads communist ideology, punishes its political opponents, supports transnational terrorist groups like Hezbollah and hosts Russian intelligence focused on stealing national security information from the U.S., the White House said.
Power issues in Cuba compounded after Venezuela halted petroleum exports to the country, following the U.S. removal of President Nicolás Maduro from office.
What is Progressive International?
Progressive International, a group dedicated to global leftist activism, organized the Nuestra America Convoy.
They invited 20 Democratic Socialists of America members; the Irish rap group, Kneecap, who notably displayed Hezbollah’s flag during a concert last year; Taylor Lorenz, a former New York Times reporter; and Jeremy Corbyn, a member of British Parliament and co-founder of the socialist political group, Your Party.
Progressive International has an advisory board of notable progressive activists and politicians, including Mariela Castro, the daughter of former Cuban dictator Raúl Castro. Castro also currently serves as Cuba’s deputy of the National Assembly of People’s Power — the only branch of government in the country.
Other notable members of Progressive International’s council include Wang Hui, a Chinese history professor who teaches that the Chinese Communist Party has strayed too far from communism and embraced market capitalism; and Canadian writer Astra Taylor, the author of “End Times Fascism.”
What messages did the activists deliver during their trip?
The now-23-year-old Thunberg summarized her takeaways in a video posted to Instagram.
U.S. President Donald Trump is “strangling the Cuban people deliberately, methodically and openly,” she said.
Thunberg continued, “Cuba stood up for the world. Now it is time for the world to stand up for Cuba. ... I am asking all of you. Every friend of peace, every defender of the right of peoples to determine their own futures, to join.”
Piker delivered a similar sentiment: “My job is to bring awareness to what my government, the United States of America, has done to the Cuban population,” he told X users. Piker referenced U.S. embargoes as the cause of Cuban infrastructure “in a state of dire disrepair.”
In a separate X post he added, “cuba has immense potential, the us governments have sought to starve & destroy that potential. conducted interviews w doctors, a neuroscientist responsible for the only alzheimer’s treatment, a palestinian in cuban medical school & the vice foreign minister. we have been lied to.”
Journalist James Kirchick pushed back against this claim in the Free Press. The current U.S. embargo “does not exclude medical supplies, shortages of which are attributable to the regime’s unwillingness to (or inability) to pay for them or because it has sold them on the black market,” he wrote.