WASHINGTON — Activists on Thursday recounted painting a “solidarity” art mural in Cuba with the communist government’s assistance.
Leftist group Code Pink hosted speakers at K Street’s Busboys and Poets restaurant to discuss their time with the Nuestra America Convoy, a coalition of activist groups that visited Cuba in recent days to protest U.S. sanctions. The trip involved activities such as giving “humanitarian” supplies to Cubans on March 21, hosting a hip-hop concert that weekend and, as one speaker put it, the state giving them “a huge wall” in Havana to paint on.
Critics have slammed the convoy as a tone-deaf tourist trip that whitewashed Cubans’ suffering under socialist economic policy, censorship and authoritarian control. Code Pink’s guests rejected that narrative, emphasizing how meaningful they felt their regime-approved art project was.
“We got the Cuban government to give us a wall, which is not that easy to do, a huge wall, about 100 feet long, maybe even longer, and 10 feet high,” Busboys and Poets founder and CEO Andy Shallal told an audience of dozens. “And so we went to paint and we thought, well, it’d be an easy thing just kind to go start putting paint on. Well, it turns out, because it’s right next to the ocean and because it’s been years and years of neglect and infrastructure problems, the wall was crumbling.”
Activists first had to scrape piles of trash away from the wall, but the final product was a “three-dimensional undersea world of beauty,” Shallal said.
“You know how in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ you go from black and white to the color?” he said. “It just suddenly, like, transformed this whole space and suddenly went from this sort of depressing, drab place to the most joyful spot in Havana.”
“So it’s just the power of art to transform spaces and transform spirits and transform people, it was so amazing,” Shallal said. “On top of that, and I don’t mean to go on, but on top of that, the young people that came were phenomenal.”
A fellow mural artist, identified as Cory, mentioned how a poor local resident with no internet service, water or electricity “was finding ways every day to get to the mural space so that he could … look out for us, take part in what we were doing, and build in brotherhood and solidarity.”
Cuba faces international criticism, even from some left-leaning groups, for censoring or jailing political dissenters and journalists who scrutinize the government. Through crushing economic sanctions, President Donald Trump convinced the regime on March 13 to release 51 prisoners. It was an example of the very pressure that Beltway activists railed against on Thursday, blaming Trump for Cuba’s poverty.
Rev. Dr. Stephany Rose of Movement 4 Freedom called Trump’s Cuba policy “white supremacy.” Another convoy participant described Cuba’s bloody 1950s communist revolution “a beacon of hope for a lot of countries.” One speaker, wearing a communist-style hat with a red star, said Cuba’s public health system should be a “blueprint” for other countries.
Some of the convoy’s travel to Cuba involved the Global Sumud Flotilla, a boat activist Greta Thunberg used in September to travel to Gaza over Israeli military action. The flotilla shows how “interconnected” the pro-Cuba and Pro-Palestinian causes are, Code Pink DC Coordinator Olivia DiNucci said Thursday.
“When we know that the enemy is the U.S., a lot of people want to work together because it, you know, has had such detrimental policies around,” DiNucci said.
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