While most nations in the Americas are committing to creating a shield against drug trafficking and in defense of national security - aligning themselves with President Donald Trump’s policies - the Spanish Left is attempting to cast itself as the general of the global Left.

In mid-April, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez hosted a summit in Barcelona organized by the Global Progressive Mobilization titled “In Defense of Democracy.” The name, of course, proved too big for the event: it served to defend undemocratic regimes, such as the Castro regime.

It is worth noting that Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez did not attend Sánchez’s summit. Perhaps this was because it had become more aligned with Washington following the major blow dealt on January 3, which culminated in the capture of the socialist dictator and drug kingpin Nicolás Maduro.

What the thousands of participants - hailing from 100 countries and representing partner organizations of the Progressive Alliance, Global Progress, and the Party of European Socialists - did make a concerted effort to emphasize was a distinct anti-conservative bias, featuring explicit allusions to Trump, Viktor Orbán, and the leading figures of the hemisphere’s new right-wing movements.

Sánchez aspires to become a global leader. He arrived in Barcelona bolstered by the “prestige” of having denied U.S. troops access to Spanish territory during the conflict with Iran - earning, in the process, a pat on the back from Alexander Soros, who excitedly posted: “Spain is becoming the leader of the free world!” Sánchez also had the dubious “honor” of having his face plastered on missiles launched by Tehran against Israel.

Much like Fidel Castro in the 1960s, Sánchez appears to aspire to global leadership from the vantage point of the Global South, employing anti-American rhetoric and actions. While Castro pursued this goal through the Non-Aligned Movement, Sánchez is pinning his hopes on the members and sympathizers of the Puebla Group. While Castro appealed to the First World Left - figures like Pierre Trudeau or Olof Palme - Sánchez solicits messages from Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Zohran Mamdani.

Those present in Barcelona “once again justified the oldest dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere, blamed the U.S. for the crisis on the island, and revived the paralyzing notion - reiterated ad nauseam - that Cubans must decide their own destiny entirely on their own,” criticized Diario de Cuba (DDC), an exile-based media outlet, in an editorial.

According to this digital newspaper - one of the most widely read outlets in the independent Cuban press - Brazilian President Lula da Silva encapsulated the leftist immorality that translates into a purely rhetorical equidistance when he stated: “Cuba has problems, but that is a problem for Cubans to solve - not for Lula, for Claudia [Sheinbaum], or for Trump.”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the website noted, expressed a desire for the island to have “a popular democracy - not the kind Washington imagines it to be.”

Sánchez and his Foreign Minister, DDC recalled, called for Cuba to decide its own destiny “freely,” as if the U.S. embargo were solely to blame for the fact that, in Cuba, one cannot dissent without facing imprisonment.

All the leaders representing the international progressive movement sidestepped the issue of the true thorn piercing Cuba’s recent history: the socialist system. They avoided discussing it because doing so would have required them to point the finger at themselves.

“It was a gathering of the Cuban dictatorship’s servants,” Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, who leads the Interamerican Democracy Institute, told this publication. “Each and every one of them owes their rise to power and their continued tenure in government to that tyranny; the funding and resources behind their electoral campaigns - or the sustenance of their political parties and non-governmental organizations - would not withstand proper scrutiny.” Sánchez Barzaín, who served as Bolivia’s Minister of the Presidency until 2003, asserted that the leaders of Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, along with Orsi of Uruguay (the latter two being leaders of the Puebla Group), solidified through their presence in Barcelona “their status as servile to Havana.”

In his view, it is shameful that elected presidents of democratic nations would defend the “criminal and narco-terrorist hub of human rights violations and state terrorism” that the island represents. “Objective reality exposes and repudiates them.”

Sánchez Barzaín believes there is a strategy underlying the Summit’s rhetoric. “They are attempting to appropriate the narrative of ‘defense of democracy’ in order to defend democracy’s greatest aggressor and enemy”; furthermore, they seek to “lay claim to the ‘defense of democracy’ so they may utilize it once the Cuban dictatorship has collapsed.”

The Barcelona Summit was not merely a matter of speeches. Sánchez Barzaín posits that the leftist factions present there were operating “just as they did following the fall of the Berlin Wall - by establishing the São Paulo Forum and proclaiming the ‘multiplication of axes of confrontation’ in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise.”

If the Spanish leadership attempts to open a new front to counter the wave of the New Right in the hemisphere, will it prove durable enough to put up a diplomatic fight in the long run? I do not think so.

Elections are scheduled in Colombia for May, and - by all indications - the Left is on its way out. The same holds true for Brazil, which will hold presidential elections in October, where Flávio Bolsonaro is currently polling well.

Although Sánchez’s allies are expected to dwindle by the end of this year, the money does not appear to be drying up. It is almost a cliché, but in this instance, the funding will flow courtesy of the heir to the Soros empire. Alexander, in fact, was present at the leftist summit held in Spain.

“It was an honor to welcome so many incredible leaders and advocates to Barcelona” for “a first-class gathering,” remarked the woke magnate. The kind of gathering for politicians who either do not know how to - or simply do not wish to - distinguish right from wrong.