By Yoe Suarez

The organization Code Pink has just launched a petition urging World Central Kitchen “to step in and provide food to the Cuban people who are being unfairly targeted” in a crisis “caused by human hands.”

Are they referring to the unjust attacks against Cuban farmers, who are prevented from freely trading the food they produce outside of the centralized state procurement system? Or perhaps to how the Castro regime prohibits hundreds of Cubans from fishing or criminalizes them when they sell their catch?

No. According to the feminist NGO, the blame lies with the U.S. embargo, the economic and diplomatic pressure of the Trump administration. Not the socialist model, whose failed nature replicates impoverishing and freedom-suppressing examples in regions as diverse as Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America.

“By forbidding third countries from shipping oil to Cuba, the U.S. government is provoking a humanitarian disaster that is entirely preventable,” says the Code Pink petition.

But the crisis already existed before. Today, almost 90% of Cubans are classified as living in poverty. Hundreds of families suffer the absence of their children, among the more than 1,000 political prisoners on the island.

Does this humanitarian crisis also concern Code Pink? Or only the one that is politically convenient for them? I’ve said it before, Cuba has become a kind of theme park for the global Left: a place to take pictures with people in rags and among the ruins of Havana, once one of the great cities of the Americas.

What Has Code Pink Done Recently?

“Hands off Cuba!” was the last audible cry of Leonardo Flores in the room where Marco Rubio was attending a foreign policy hearing this week. Flores, a middle-aged Venezuelan-American activist with a kufiya wrapped around his neck, held up a sign with the message “Hands off Venezuela.”

The sign was signed by Code Pink, which offers ideological tourism packages to that theme park for resentful adults that is socialist Cuba.

This feminist group, which loves the patriarchs of socialist dictatorships, proudly claimed responsibility for the disruption. “Marco Rubio, you and Trump are thugs!” shouted Flores, who is the Latin America campaign coordinator of Code Pink. “The sanctions on Venezuela are collective punishment,” he continued before the Capitol Police arrested him. “That’s a war crime.”

Code Pink is concerned that the sanctions have led to “tens of thousands of deaths by restricting access to medicine, food, and essential imports, crippling the economy, and exacerbating a humanitarian crisis.” However, neither the American feminists nor Flores had anything to say about the eight million Venezuelans who have fled the country, the more than 18,000 political detentions, and the more than 800 political prisoners incarcerated until the end of 2025.

Flores, now the latest hero of the Left, has dedicated his professional life to the “political analysis of US-Venezuela relations,” according to the LA Progressive newspaper. And to that end, he has not hesitated to clamor for the freedom of a former convict on money laundering charges like the now politically disgraced Alex Saab, front man for former dictator Nicolás Maduro.

During the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing interrupted by Flores, Rubio refused to rule out the possibility of further attacks on Venezuelan territory.

The Left Is Shouting, but What Is Really Happening with the Venezuelan Elite?

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s interim government is beginning to back down in its actions: it agreed to submit a monthly budget to the Trump administration, which will provide funds to the South American country through an account in Qatar, where the U.S. will deposit the funds derived from oil sales.

Definitely, as Stephen Miller said in early January, post-Maduro Chavista Venezuela will do whatever Washington orders. Delcy Rodríguez’s most recent moves confirm this: she replaced a considerable number of military commanders in some regions of the country, all allegedly with prior approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

This week, and after years without airtime on television, María Corina Machado reappeared on the state-owned Venevisión. The broadcast took place within the framework of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s agenda in Washington, and revealed further changes regarding the strict censorship of information and control of media space in Venezuela.

The pragmatism of the Chavista leadership today is clear. Delcy Rodríguez’s concern for her own survival is equal to the disillusionment and frenzy of the grassroots leftist activists. As if it were a distant and incompatible love, the radical base wants more socialism and more anti-imperialism, while the leadership is letting go of that rhetoric, that dilapidated dock. It’s painful to watch.

With the same hands that typed fervent defenses of the fraudulent electoral process that declared Maduro the winner in the presidential elections in the summer of 2024, in 2026 she complains about the Southern Command’s airstrikes against drug boats and the “kidnapping of President” Maduro.

The Venezuela Solidarity Network, which operates as a proxy for Chavista policy in the United States, had already condemned the “escalation of aggression by the Trump administration against Venezuela,” which involved placing a $50 million bounty for information leading to the arrest of the “elected president of Venezuela,” referring to Hugo Chávez’s successor.

The misplaced tantrums and falsehoods of leftist activism are nothing new. But in this new context for the United States, these actions can be countered with the pedagogical force of the law.

As Flores was protesting in a prohibited area (such as inside the congressional buildings), a guard escorted him out of the room. Meanwhile, Senator Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, reminded him: “Alright, here we go… you know how this works, straight to jail.”

If the Chavista leadership in Caracas can understand that there are consequences for those who play dirty (trafficking drugs, sponsoring enemies of the West, or destabilizing the hemisphere), the political zombies into which those who demand Maduro’s release have transformed must understand that protesting is their right, but not if it involves sabotaging democratic procedures such as a hearing — or worse, vandalizing buildings or attacking law enforcement officers.

For the moment, however, it is clear that Code Pink and other activists do not want the United States interfering in Venezuela or Cuba. “Hands off Venezuela!” He prefers, instead, the brutal fist of the tyrant against the people.