Hasan Piker’s Cuba Trip Is Really Worse Than You Can Imagine

Hassan Piker, Jeremy Corbyn, and Code Pink head to Cuba to show their support for the communist regime. And Cubans themselves are not happy. Welcome to America Uncovered, I'm Chris Chappell. Cuba just experienced its third nationwide blackout this month. Human Rights Watch reports that people don't have reliable access to drinking water, hospitals can't operate safely, basic goods are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and garbage is piling up in the streets. This is some pretty dark stuff, both figuratively and literally. And that's really not the kind of thing YouTube likes to monetize. Which is why I'm so grateful for this week's sponsor, Outskill. Outskill has trained more than 10 million people around the world, including a lot of America Uncovered viewers who have found it really valuable. LightArtist1863 said he attended the Outskill Mastermind Seminar and completed it and it was worth it. 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So if you aren't yet making the most of AI to save you time and money, sign up with my link below, or use the QR code and get this training for free. And now, back to Cuba. Usually when people hear about a humanitarian crisis like this, you might expect cargo ships to start arriving full of food, medical supplies, and aid workers. But we live in the stupidest timeline, so instead, Cubans were treated to a concert by Irish EDM rap trio Kneecap. Haven't the Cuban people suffered enough? Now you're probably asking yourself, why? What is the point of this? Well, that concert was part of the Nuestra America Convoy, which bills itself as an international humanitarian mission to break the US blockade on Cuba. The basic pitch is that Cuba is suffering. The US is squeezing it, and so a group of concerned citizens from around the world would deliver supplies and show solidarity with the Cuban people. Open supporters of the convoy include the likes of leftist US politician Rashida Tlaib and Greta Thunberg, the medieval squire who's apparently forgotten all about the world-ending threat of climate change in favor of geopolitics. As for those who went to Cuba, I tell you, the convoy sure sent in their A-team. Besides Kneecap, whose members are apparently big fans of the terrorist group Hezbollah, you also have Hasan Piker, the communist nepo-baby who made his name streaming on Twitch, a platform owned by Amazon and Jeff Bezos, just in case you're wondering. And of course you have Code Pink, a left-wing activist group led by Jody Evans, wife of China-based billionaire Neville Roy Singham. Yep, when you're living under a communist dictatorship that's getting squeezed to death by international sanctions, these are the people you'd want to come to your rescue. Along for the ride, you also had former British labor leader Jeremy Corbyn and Ilma Mar's 23-year-old daughter, as well as dozens of parliamentarians, journalists, and left-wing politicians from around the world. The convoy was organized by Code Pink and a group called Progressive International, which coordinates left-wing political movements globally. Worth noting, their advisory council includes Mariela Castro, the daughter of Raul Castro. She's a deputy in Cuba's National Assembly and a member of the Cuban political apparatus. So the organization running the convoy to Cuba has the Castro family embedded in its own leadership structure. I'd call that a red flag, but maybe that's a little too on the nose. Now, when you're going on a humanitarian mission to a country in crisis, where people are running out of drinking water and the streets are turning into open sewers, you might want to, I don't know, rough it a little? Stay somewhere modest? Show some solidarity? But instead, many of the convoy's leaders chose to stay at the Grand Hotel Bristol Melilla Collection, a five-star hotel whose cheapest rooms go for over $100 a night. Which is to say, more than five months of wages for the average Cuban. When critics pointed this out, Hasan Piker went on stream to explain. The American government makes it illegal for Americans to stay wherever they want when they're in Cuba. They have to stay in what they've declared as five-star hotels. That claim was immediately fact-checked by an ex-community note which clarified that US law only prohibits Americans from staying at venues owned by the Cuban government or connected figures. There is no law requiring anyone to stay at a five-star hotel. Meanwhile, a Cuban man filmed himself standing outside the hotel, which remained lit thanks to a private generator, while the rest of the neighborhood was left in complete darkness. Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and Cuban Exile, who was forced to leave the island at the age of 12, put it bluntly. They're staying at a five-star hotel while the island's electrical grid has collapsed for the second time in a week. These hundreds of communists from around the world are feasting on lobster tail and treating Cuba as an ideological theme park. An ideological theme park. That's a great way to put it. And I'll be coming back to that. But here's where it gets truly special. Remember that kneecap show I talked about? That happened on Saturday, March 21st. March 21st was also the day Cuba suffered its third nationwide blackout of the month. And some reports suggested the blackout happened mid-concert. But still, kneecap kept playing. Now, I want you to think about the economics here for a second. Cuba doesn't have a free market for electricity. It has a centrally planned, state-rationed electrical grid. The government decides who gets power and who doesn't. So when a five-star hotel runs its private generator, and when a concert venue stays lit while the rest of the island goes dark, that's not the free market at play. Those are deliberate decisions made by the same regime that helped plan this convoy. The Cuban government had to choose. And it chose optics over its own citizens. As one Cuban exile put it, while nearly the entire country is suffering from power outages lasting over 20 hours, the left is welcomed with air conditioning and wasteful electricity consumption. More than 100 homes wouldn't be without power today if the Castro regime didn't spend on communist propaganda with the international left. OK, that's a pretty bad look. But hey, at least they said they were bringing supplies to the island, right? Well, I mean, technically, I guess. The convoy brought with it 20 tons of aid, valued at over $570,000—medical supplies, food, solar panels, and the like. That sounds significant. Until you do the math. Cuba has 11 million people. 20 tons of aid at $570,000 works out to roughly a nickel's worth of supplies per person. A single mid-sized cargo ship delivers more. It is, in the context of Cuba's crisis, a rounding error. And that's before we get to the distribution problem, which nobody in the convoy actually has an answer to. As the Havana Times points out, no details are known about how the supplies will be distributed once they arrive on the island. Will there be independent oversight mechanisms to ensure that the aid reaches the population directly? Cuba doesn't have an independent civil society. There are no autonomous NGOs with their own distribution networks. There's no Red Cross equivalent operating outside state supervision. Every port, every warehouse, every hospital supply chain runs through the government. So when Code Pink hands over pallets of medicine at the airport, their custody of those supplies ends at that moment. What happens next is entirely at the regime's discretion. And the regime has a well-documented track record of redirecting foreign aid, including medical supplies, into hard currency shops where goods are sold back to the ordinary Cubans at prices they can't afford, generating revenue for the state. So while those supplies may be real, the odds of them reaching the hospital patients who need them are a lot less certain. Speaking of patients, NBC News got a rare look inside a Cuban hospital this week. Now, when a government that tightly controls media access suddenly opens a single hospital for cameras, you should think carefully about what you're actually seeing. This isn't journalism so much as a guided tour. The hospital they chose was the Institute of Hematology and Immunology, one of the best equipped facilities on the island. But even there, one nurse told NBC that the power goes out one to three times a day, lasting anywhere from one to eight hours. This puts things like life-saving medicine, which sometimes have to be kept refrigerated, at risk. The hospital's labs have even had to reduce their operations from five days a week to just two in order to save fuel. Though they did make a point to tell NBC that no patient has died as a result of the blackouts and shortages. Which, if true, is kind of miraculous. Though it may be wise to take that with a boulder-sized grain of salt. And this is to say nothing of Cuba's many other less fortunate hospitals. Although the hospital visited is one of the best equipped in the country, the workers themselves admitted that the situation in other institutions could be even more critical. But here's the thing that should bother everyone about these news items, these streamers, and the New Estramerica convoy itself. The pure absurdity of it all. Let's go back in time to the days of the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty was the New York Times-Moscow Bureau chief in the 1920s and early 1930s. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting on the Soviet Union. Reporting that systematically denied the Holodomor, Stalin's engineered famine that killed somewhere between 3 and 7 million Ukrainians. Duranty got regime-curated tours of model farms. He reported what the Soviets wanted reported. He gave Stalin international legitimacy at the moment the regime was the most vulnerable to outside pressure. And he knew what was happening. But he chose access over truth. The New Estramerica convoy is using the same playbook, updated for the social media age. In some ways, it's even worse than Duranty's case. Duranty was operating in an era when verification was genuinely difficult. Hassan Piker, meanwhile, is living in the 21st century. He has a smartphone. He has the internet. Cuba's real-life conditions aren't some big secret. He merely walks past them to get to his five-star hotel. As one Cuban exile told the New York Post, the left visits Cuba as if it were a party at a zoo, and they go to admire the misery from a luxury hotel. A party at a zoo, an ideological theme park, a safari for rich Western communists to gawk at people's suffering and call it noble. The suffering is the content. They get to feel like revolutionaries, fly home to their Amazon money, and Cuba stays dark. It's just insane. These people are communists and proud of it. They'll tell you the Cuban system is a good system, worth defending and celebrating. And yet the system they're defending has never, not for a single year in its entire existence, survived without being subsidized by a larger power. After the revolution, Cuba went from economic dependency on the United States to economic dependency on the Soviet Union. Moscow was subsidizing Havana to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Cheap oil, artificially inflated sugar prices, essentially keeping the entire economy on life support. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba had what they called the Special Period. Severe food shortages and total economic implosion. The system didn't adapt. It waited for the next patron. That patron turned out to be Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan petrodollars. For more than two decades, Venezuela pumped cheap oil into Cuba and kept the lights on. Now Venezuela's gone, too. And Cuba is back to exactly where it always lands when the external subsidy dries up. Collapse. An ideology that claims to represent self-determination, anti-imperialism, and liberation from capitalism has required continuous life support from outside powers for its entire existence. It has never stood on its own. That's not a blockade problem. That's a fundamental indictment of the system itself. So what did the Nuestra America convoy actually accomplish? It delivered a symbolic drop in the bucket of supplies, with no accountability for where they end up. It consumed electricity that Cuba's ration system had to divert from people who actually needed it. It gave a communist dictatorship a propaganda lifeline, international celebrities meeting with the regime to signal legitimacy at the exact moment the government is teetering. And it muddied the attribution of Cuba's crisis, pushing the narrative that the US blockade is the sole cause when Cuba was already collapsing under the weight of six decades of central planning, long before Trump tightened the screws. Here is the simplest summary of what the Nuestra America convoy achieved. The Cuban government had just enough energy to power a five-star hotel and a concert for a handful of Western activists. 11 million Cubans sat in the dark, and kneecap kept playing. What do you think? Are these influencers merely useful idiots, or malicious idiots? Leave a comment below. And if you're not yet skilled in using AI, there's still a chance to upgrade yourself quickly. Click my link below and register for Outskill's free AI training this weekend. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching.