Last February, I warned that an international brigade intended to save Cuba. Was that why Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, told NBC that the Castroist army was preparing for an attack?

Nothing of the sort. It was merely a contingent from the international Left — one that was simply going to pat dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel on the back. It comprised figures who once floated in the upper echelons of European politics — such as Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and former Spanish Vice President Pablo Iglesias — down to “Champagne Socialists” like influencer Hasan Piker and the Irish rap group Kneecap. Also accompanying the group were well-known pro-Castro opinion leaders from the United States — such as Danny Valdés, co-founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba — according to leftist media outlets.

The group members arrived on a comfortable charter flight and toured Havana in electric cars, guided by government officials. They strolled through hospitals and schools — where they failed to ask a single doctor or child they encountered whether they had food at home — and ended up at a concert in the middle of the El Vedado neighborhood, jumping and singing, while not far away, more than a thousand political prisoners remained incarcerated.

In less than a week, the island has experienced two nationwide blackouts. This is something the “friends of the proletariat” likely didn’t even notice, since the Aston and Meliá Habana hotels — where they were staying — were, at one point, the only spots in the capital with electricity, as reported by commentator Agustín Antonetti.

Outside, to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed by the noise of the nightly protests — during which Cubans demand freedom — the political police maintained a heavy security presence.

In this adult theme park into which the global Left has transformed Cuba — walking right over the bones and hunger of millions of Cubans spanning generations — the “Nuestra América” flotilla has become an object of scorn and mockery.

At another point during their “ideological tourism” itinerary, participants in the flotilla marched down Havana’s bustling San Lázaro Street, shouting revolutionary slogans — a street now dutifully and surgically illuminated so that the visitors could engage in their anti-imperialist cosplay. The Castro regime — facing a populace now utterly disillusioned — brings in foreign legions to march on its behalf.

In addition to providing a facelift for the regime, members of the flotilla were filmed asking children to dance in exchange for sweet cookies on a street in the capital. Let no one forget how, amidst repression and destitution, a contingent of the international Left went there to mock our children and to applaud the very tyrant who starves them!

Indignant reactions from Cubans on social media were swift and immediate. Two of these responses encapsulate my own sentiments as a Cuban who endured the rigors of socialism — and who remains in exile today precisely because of the tyranny that this “gourmet Left” now applauds.

Writer Zoe Valdés, an exile living in Paris, criticized the contingent’s “solidarity” theater in a poignant post. “They were paid for first-class tickets; they were provided with aircraft reserved exclusively for them. They utilized air and ground transportation that consumes gasoline, while Cubans survive amidst blackouts, cooking with firewood and charcoal,” she wrote. “They were lodged in five-star hotels, while infants and the elderly die in hospitals shrouded in darkness. The blame lies solely with the blockade imposed by that 67-year-old tyranny — a regime that imprisons and executes its own people. They were fed well; they were invited on a safari where poor, starving Cubans serve as their sideshow curiosities.”

For Valdés, the members of the flotilla ought to feel ashamed, “for they will not remain to offer any real assistance; instead, they will return — bloated with ‘social-communism’ — to the comfortable capitalism that enables them to be so hypocritical and inconsistent.”

Meanwhile, Yoaxis Marcheco, an evangelical journalist exiled in the United States, highlighted the stark contrast: while the Cuban people “sink into the darkness of night, into hopelessness, into swarms of mosquitoes, into a Cuba where only garbage abounds,” and where “there is no fuel to light homes, nor for hospitals, nor for transportation,” resources are available for propaganda — “for the farce of hosting a gaggle of leftist foreigners and putting on a spectacle of lights, transport, and food.”

For Marcheco, “it is imperative that a miracle put an end to this senile tyranny — that it wipe it from the face of the earth. Light must reach the Cuban people with urgency; once that miracle occurs, we must keep this plague of stale leftism at bay, wherever it may come from. We must drive it away forever, for our agony has lasted far too long.”