Editors at National Review Online ponder a particularly clueless element of the American political left.
If there is one thing communist regimes have excelled at over the years, it is creating showcases to gull sympathetic Western visitors.
It was in this spirit that Cuba mustered a single luxury hotel with a gas generator for the latest in a long train of useful idiots.
A motley collection of activists with the China-linked anti-war group Code Pink, as well as a handful of far-left influencers, descended on Havana set on convincing the long-suffering Cuban people that they’ve never had it so good. Sure, a rolling nationwide blackout spoiled some of the fun, but this crew still managed to blame the United States for the Cuban regime’s deficiencies.
“I cannot believe how cruel this U.S. policy is,” Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson marveled while surveying the darkened landscape from the balcony of his five-star redoubt. “We could stop this.” That’s the message the Cuban handlers of the “Nuestra America Convoy,” which was designed to “show the world that Cuba is under siege,” wanted.
Perhaps Robinson didn’t know that Cuba’s rolling blackouts are an endemic feature of life on that island. They predate the extradition of Nicolás Maduro, whose criminal regime was propped up by Cuban military and intelligence officials in exchange for privileged energy exports. Indeed, even oil-rich Venezuela’s power grid struggled for years amid a “brain drain” and “corruption,” and Cuba is beset by the same problems. These issues are a predictable outgrowth of socialist maladministration.
The Cuban regime and its fellow travelers insist, as they always do, that the capitalist world’s refusal to prop up their economy is the source of all their woes. The truth is that the system established by Fidel Castro and buttressed for decades by Soviet beneficence has never prioritized its own people. The Cuban government has preyed on its own people and sought to frustrate American geostrategic interests all over the globe.
