EXCLUSIVE: DC’s Cuba Activists Celebrate Regime-Backed Art Project While Cubans Suffer

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.”