A video circulating on social media appears to show a group of international leftists making Cuban children dance in the street in exchange for cookies. The footage, widely shared by Venezuelan journalist Emmanuel Rincón, surfaced in the context of a visit by prominent left-wing figures to Havana. Breitbart News could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video, and journalists have not confirmed the date it was filmed or who exactly was participating in the cookie dance.
But the video landed in a context that makes it impossible to dismiss. The visitors are believed to form part of the "Nuestra America" pro-regime tour group, a collection of the world's most prominent hardline leftists, reportedly in the country to protest President Donald Trump's policies against communism. The group's reported roster includes former U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, former Iranian television host from Spain Pablo Iglesias, and leftist gaming streamer Hasan Piker.
They traveled to a country where children go hungry. And if the video is what it appears to be, some of them turned that hunger into entertainment.
According to Breitbart, while the video's authenticity remains unverified, the verified statements from members of the tour group tell their own story. Piker, during a live video on Saturday, offered his audience a picture of Cuba that would be unrecognizable to the millions trapped on the island:
"There's rolling blackouts … people are partying in the fucking streets, I don't know if its like an island mindset … I'm sure that has something to do with it, but, like, they're just chillin. Cubans just – they vibe, they chill, they just literally vibe, it don't matter, like, it's just incredible… there's like festivals everywhere."
Rolling blackouts. People are unable to keep food cold or hospitals lit. And the takeaway from a man with a massive online platform is that Cubans "just vibe." The island suffered a nationwide blackout this same weekend. Piker saw a party.
He also updated viewers on the group's activities with a phrase borrowed from a 1999 Ricky Martin hit:
"We've just been livin' la vida loca."
For the Cubans who can't leave, the vida isn't loca. It's desperate.
Piker wasn't the only one projecting vacation energy onto a humanitarian disaster. Christian Smalls, a leftist "worker" activist, published a photo in which he appears wearing five luxury chains alongside a crowd of poor Cuban children. The image requires no commentary. It is its own editorial.
Meanwhile, members of the Irish rap group Kneecap, who held a concert in Havana that same weekend, offered a somewhat more honest account. In a Channel 4 interview, member JJ Ó Dochartaigh described what he actually saw on the ground:
"We were just walking around this morning there and we see that one of the local pharmacies are down to the bare bones with medicines."
He continued:
"There's queues in the corner with people trying to get bread, people are hungry, as well, and we know going back as far as the forced starvation that happened in Ireland, we were supported by the Choctaw people, Native Americans who sent over funds to help people over here starving."
Note the framing. Even when acknowledging starvation, the instinct was to pivot to a historical grievance narrative and away from the obvious question: why are Cubans starving under a communist government that has held total power for over half a century?
The suffering in Cuba is not new, and it is not mysterious. Cubans have lived with minimal access to health care and basic foods since the 1960s. Fidel Castro implemented a communist rationing system in the 1960s. The regime has delivered 67 years of poverty, starvation, lack of access to medical care, and worse.
The Cuban people have not been silent about it. On July 11, 2021, an estimated 187,000 people in every major city took to the streets demanding an end to the Castro regime. The government's response was predictable. The protests were crushed.
And the ruling Castro dynasty did not share in the deprivation it imposed. The most recent estimate, by Forbes in 2006, indicated that Fidel Castro was personally worth about $900 million. The revolution, as always, enriched the revolutionaries.
This is what makes the "Nuestra America" tour so clarifying. These Western leftists did not travel to Cuba to document suffering or deliver aid. They went to protest American policies, specifically limits on America's largest corporations' spending money with the Castro regime. Their trip coincided with the United States executing a warrant for deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, the accused narco-terrorist whose regime has produced its own humanitarian catastrophe.
The pattern is consistent:
This is not solidarity. It is tourism dressed in ideology. When you fly into a country experiencing a nationwide blackout and your takeaway is that the locals "vibe," you are not an ally of the oppressed. You are a guest of the oppressor who found the atmosphere charming.
Whether or not every detail of the video is confirmed, the verified facts alone are damning. Wealthy Western activists traveled to an impoverished, authoritarian island. They wore luxury jewelry next to hungry children. They broadcast to millions that Cubans are happy. They protested not the regime that rations bread, but the American policies that pressure it.
Cubans have been hungry since before most of these activists were born. That hunger is not a side effect of sanctions. It is the product of a system these visitors flew in to celebrate.
Children in free countries do not dance for cookies from foreign tourists. That image, verified or not, captures something the tour group's own words already proved: they see Cuban suffering and find it quaint.