Shortages of food, medicine, water and fuel have plunged Cuba into a deepening humanitarian crisis, leaving residents in the dark with deteriorating public services.
The crisis, driven by systemic mismanagement and intensified by a U.S. oil blockade, spurred a group of liberal activists to travel to the country.
Our America Convoyan international coalition of activist organizations including Progressive International, The People’s Forum and Code Pink, traveled to Cuba March 21-23 to deliver humanitarian aid. Hasan Piker, a left-wing controversial and influential Twitch streamerand Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., participated in the trip.
“We are organizing a people-powered mission to break the blockade and deliver aid as well as a powerful message: the people of Cuba are not alone,” Code Pink, a U.S.-based, anti-war organization said on its website.
But some commentators and conservative politicians denounced the trip as performative and said the activists mocked the Cuban people by staying in luxury hotels and traveling in air conditioned buses.
One of those critics was Florida Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American whose district includes a large Cuban population in Miami. Salazar accused the activists of staying in five-star hotels and organizing a concert that she said caused a local hospital to lose power and Cubans to die.
Piker, meanwhile, said U.S. law requires Americans to stay in certain hotels and that the attacks were a “distraction” from the activists’ work.
Cuba’s government, which human rights groups broadly criticize as repressive, gave the convoy its blessing. Some Cubans criticized the activists for meeting with President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
We decided to sort out the claims.
Salazar: Activists organized an Irish band’s concert that caused a power outage at a nearby hospital where “seven Cubans died because they were on ventilators.”
We could not find credible evidence supporting this; Salazar did not provide any.
In a March 23 Fox News interviewSalazar said a “light show” from an Irish band’s concert that activists were involved in “sucked all the energy, all the electricity” in the neighborhood, causing a nearby hospital to lose power. “Seven Cubans died because they were on ventilators, and since the hospital lost power, the people couldn’t continue breathing — that’s what Code Pink did,” Salazar said.
Irish hip-hop band Kneecap traveled with the convoy and played March 21 in Havana. Organizers told The New York Times they didn’t plan the concert. But convoy participants joined an open-air festival already underway in Havana, and Kneecap gave an impromptu performance.
Code Pink Co-founder Medea Benjamin, a trip organizer, said Cuban bands were playing at the festival before Kneecap joined in.
“Even in these miserable conditions, the Cuban people still love their culture and music and Kneecap was an added guest,” Benjamin said in a phone interview, adding that the festival used a generator for the speakers. “I can 100% guarantee that did not cause any power outage.”
Cuba was hit with its second blackout in a week hours after Kneecap played at the festival, prompting some on social media to blame the concert for causing a nearby hospital to lose power and patients on ventilators to die.
Stories and social media posts later identified the hospital as Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana, with some blaming the concert and others saying the hospital went dark because the U.S. oil blockade continues to cut off Cuba’s electricity source.
In a March 23 Facebook postthe Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital refuted that any ventilator patients died as a result of the outage. Sharing a partially obscured post that repeated the claim, the hospital, in Spanish, said“There was no deceased in our Institution associated with mechanical assisted ventilation failures,” during the March 21 outage.
News organizations, some reporting from inside Cuban hospitals, have documented the strain doctors are facing because of the blackouts. None, so far, have reported any deaths linked to the Kneecap concert, or any deaths at Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital due to ventilator failure.
Salazar: “They stayed in a five-star hotel with electricity.”
Salazar didn’t respond with evidence, but Fox News and The New York Post reported that some in the convoy stayed at the Gran Hotel Bristol Habana Vieja, which is listed as a five-star hotel in Old Havana.
The New York Times, meanwhile, reported March 23 that Piker and other activists stayed at the Iberostar Marques de la Torre, another five-star Havana hotel.
Benjamin confirmed to PolitiFact that the 170-person group stayed at the Iberostar Marques de la Torre.
“We were there because there are only five or so hotels in Havana that are not on the U.S.’ list of prohibited hotels, and those are all four- or five-star hotels,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin said the group chose the hotel because it had enough accommodations for the large group and because of its central location, which allowed little gasoline usage. “We only used buses to get from the airport to the hotel, and from the hotel to the airport,” she said. “We walked literally everywhere else.”
As part of U.S. sanctions on Cuba, Americans are prohibited to lodge, pay for lodging or make reservations for any property linked to the Cuban state. These include properties owned or controlled by the Cuban government, or by a prohibited official of the government, member of the Cuba Communist Party or their relatives.
On its website, the U.S. State Department currently lists about 400 hotels, guest houses and other lodgings in Cuba where Americans are prohibited from staying. Other accommodation options, including private homes, small hotels, hostels or Airbnb rentals are legal and available for American citizens.
Convoy organizers told the Times that some, such as Code Pink, opted for hotels because of their capacity for large groups and others stayed in smaller lodgings, including private homes.
Piker: “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.”
Piker defended the decision to stay in a luxury hotel, saying in a livestream and on X that five-star hotels are one of the few places in Cuba where the U.S. government allows Americans to stay.
Although Piker may have been referring to U.S.-approved hotels in Havana that can accommodate large groups, there are no U.S. regulations that limit American citizens to stay only in five-star hotels across Cuba. The restrictions are related to hotel ownership, not the level of luxury.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.
