The theme park of the revolution

These days, the so-called "Our America Convoy to Cuba" docked at the port of Havana as if it were an anti-capitalist safari. Sold to the world as an epic gesture of solidarity and an indispensable humanitarian convoy to break the "imperialist encirclement," the expedition managed to gather an eclectic and predictable cast of the international radical left.

The list of passengers, which looked like something out of a global casting call for nostalgic militants, included the former Spanish vice-president and current director of Canal Red, Pablo Iglesias; the incombustible former British Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn; the American Twitch streamer, Hasan Piker; and, to give a countercultural veneer to the affair, the Irish rap group Kneecap. In all, according to the organizers themselves, 650 delegates from 33 countries and 120 organizations. What the epic announcement omitted was the central logistical detail: the vast majority arrived by plane. Three vessels departed from Mexico; the rest took regular commercial flights. The flotilla was, to a large extent, a metaphor.

The fundamental problem with this colorful entourage was their completely alienated and frivolous perspective: to them, Cuba is not a real country, inhabited by exhausted citizens suffering from systematic repression and the worst food and energy crisis in its recent history. For these ideological tourists, the island is a fetish, the static idealization of the Cold War, a Caribbean "Disney" where they can go to revalidate their revolutionary credentials without ever having to endure the asphyxiating consequences of the system they so applaud in front of the cameras.

This willful blindness to the suffering of others has an almost century-old tradition on the left. The most direct parallel is the visit of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to the Soviet Union in 1931. While millions starved to death during the famines caused by Stalin's collectivist policies, Shaw strolled around sumptuous state banquets, devoured caviar and, on his return to London, declared that in Russia he had not seen a single person go hungry.

Ninety-five years later, the cognitive dissonance repeats itself in the Caribbean, carbon-copied as a farce. The delegates of the flotilla arrived with the pomp of the great redeemers, posing next to some twenty tons of supplies and solar panels that are not even enough to correct a miscalculation of the disastrous national power grid. They arrived to "save" a population that, after the social outbursts due to the lack of bread and electricity, endures blackouts of up to 18 hours a day. And what was the proletarian trench chosen by these modern martyrs to wage their cultural battle? The Gran Hotel Bristol Habana Vieja.

The lead lifeline that laid bare the Castro apartheid

The contrast resulted in an obscene cynicism that the international press was quick to tear apart. While the Cuban people struggle to get the basics, the VIP delegation settled in a five-star resort. From the comfort of their air-conditioned suites, with privileged views and high-speed wifi connection, Pablo Iglesias pontificated on the goodness of sacrifice and declared before the cameras of Canal Red that the Cuban situation was "certainly difficult, but not as it is being presented from the outside either." The phrase, recorded from a room that costs more than the monthly salary of several Cubans combined, deserves a place in some museum of political hypocrisy.

Piker, for his part, was no slouch. When critics on social networks pointed out the detail of the luxury accommodations, he responded with an explanation that would have been impossible to make up: "The American government makes it illegal for Americans to stay where we want in Cuba. We have to stay in five-star hotels." The anti-capitalist activist, in short, was a victim of hotel imperialism. Meanwhile, he was broadcasting live for his followers with an impeccable internet connection that the ordinary Cuban, when he has electricity, cannot even imagine.

On the night of March 21, while Kneecap offered his "solidarity" performance, Cuba suffered a total disconnection of the national electricity system, confirmed by the Ministry of Energy itself. Eleven million people in the dark. The Gran Hotel Bristol was one of the few points in the country that kept the power on, courtesy of its own generators. The images that circulated on networks were brutally eloquent: the hotel shining like a lighthouse in the middle of a blacked-out city, with the revolutionary delegates inside and the Cuban people outside, in darkness. The set of the revolution, illuminated. The revolution, in darkness.

What the Canal Red frames were trying to hide was that this hotel is part of a system designed for exactly that: to guarantee comfort to foreigners while denying the basics to the locals. The delegation's expenses went directly into the pockets of the Cuban state, the same state that keeps hundreds of dissidents in jail and imprisons those who dared to take to the streets to demand freedom.

Far from underpinning Díaz-Canel's narrative of victimization, the level of disconnection of the flotilla validated the existence of a brutal economic apartheid on the island. The world, and Cubans themselves, were left with a very clear picture: if the asphyxiation of the embargo is so absolute and is the sole cause of the general misery, how can one explain these concrete mills with their own generators and luxuries that the State religiously guarantees to foreigners while denying them to locals? The VIP revolutionaries, in their myopia, demonstrated to the planet that in Cuba there are resources, but they are destined to enrich the leadership and to finance propaganda.

Jeremy Corbyn completed the picture with the solvency of a veteran. The Labour man, who traveled to Havana with Kneecap (a band whose member Mo Chara was prosecuted under British anti-terrorism legislation for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag at a concert), met personally with Diaz-Canel and held a press conference in which he challenged Europe to send an oil tanker to Cuba. His argument is that if France, Germany or Britain were to send an oil tanker to Cuba, Trump would relent. A remarkable geopolitical gamble for someone who arrived on a commercial flight from London, stayed in a hotel with a generator and did not meet a single political prisoner during his visit.

Kneecap, for his part, argued that it is not in his nature to remain silent in the face of injustice. An understandable stance, though more convincing if it had not been enunciated from a five-star hotel on the same day the entire country was without electricity. The band ended up being the most perfect image of the whole trip: revolution as aesthetic accessory, solidarity as performance.

The visit was a gigantic farce and an affront to a people no one asked whether they wanted to serve as scenery. At no time did the organizers explain how the aid would be distributed once in Cuba, who would supervise that it reached the population and not the state apparatus, nor what percentage of the funds collected went to the travel and lodging expenses of the delegates themselves. The practical questions went unanswered, buried under the noise of the spectacle.

In a matter of days, these seasonal activists returned to their lives without a hitch, leaving behind a population condemned to misery that they used as a backdrop. They crossed the sea convinced that they would be the saviours of a system that is breaking down day by day. They ended up being its worst publicists, exposing with their own frivolity the moral miseries of a dictatorship that they have been refusing to denounce for decades.