Cuba’s Puppet President, Wearing Keffiyeh, Greets Radical Leftist U.S. Students in Havana

A group of far-left U.S. students representing the “Let Cuba Live” pro-regime group held an encounter in Havana on Monday evening with the figurehead president of Cuba’s communist Castro regime, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

The students expressed their support of both socialism and the ruling communist regime while condemning the United States and demanding a “socialist world.”

The “Let Cuba Live” group is an international nongovernment coalition of leftist activists that calls for an end of the U.S. “embargo” on Cuba and demands the nation’s removal from the United States’ list of States Sponsor of Terrorism. The United States maintains Cuba on the list because of the Castro regime’s deep ties with international terrorist organizations, such as the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Shiite jihadist organization Hezbollah, and Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Marxist terrorist groups.

The pro-Castro regime group, on its website, lists several regional “convening organizations” the Sao Paulo Forum, a coalition of leftist governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, for example. 

The group is also reportedly linked to The People’s Forum, a U.S. far-left organization with friendly ties to the Castro regime and China’s Communist Party. The organization, which has received training from the Castro regime, is one of the groups that has reportedly y supported anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protests across the United States following Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 terrorist attack, which left more than 1,200 dead and hundreds taken hostage. The group reportedly organized one such pro-Hamas rally in Times Square, New York, right after the attack on Israel took place:

The leftist U.S. students’ encounter with Díaz-Canel was moderated by Manolo De Los Santos, the executive director of The People’s Forum and one of the far-left activists who, according to several reports, is behind the pro-Hamas protests across U.S. campuses.

De los Santos, who has an extensive track record of cooperation with the Castro regime’s leadership and conducted Marxist studies in Cuba, is also believed to have played a role in the storming of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in late April.

Díaz-Canel, who wore a Palestinian keffiyeh during the encounter, said that it was a “pleasure” to spend time with the leftist American students. The figurehead president spent much of the event condemning the United States and capitalism and blaming the U.S. for Cuba’s woes, which in reality are the product of over six decades of communist mismanagement:

Díaz-Canel offered his defense of communism and claimed that Cuba — which has been ruled by the same communist regime for over six decades — is “more democratic” than the United States.

“There is a virtual Cuba, in social media, and there is another real Cuba, which is the one you are seeing. And we have shortages, we have problems, we have limitations but here there are no missing people, here there are no murders. This country is more democratic than the United States,” Díaz-Canel said:

Díaz-Canel also defended Cuba’s communist single-party system by claiming that democracy is not about the number of parties but, rather, is about the possibility of people “making use of their rights.”

“They say we are not democratic because we have only one party, and the United States is democratic because it has two parties? One party, the Republican party, applied the 243 measures to tighten the blockade, and another party, the Democratic party, maintained the blockade measures,” Díaz-Canel said. “What is the story? Is democracy measured by the number of parties or is democracy really measured by how people in a society can make use of their rights?”:

The Castro regime’s figurehead president made mention of Cuba’s food, power, and fuel shortages but claimed the United States is “taking advantage” of the situation to “convey the image that the Cuban government is incompetent.”

“We are living a difficult moment, but Fidel and Raúl [Castro] when they led the country also faced very complex situations and together with the people they overcame them,” Díaz-Canel said.

Manolo de los Santos, as moderator, asserted that the event was a “rare” opportunity for young Americans to be able to meet with a president.

“We have been mobilizing for months in the United States, demanding that our President listen to us, and today we woke up to see a White House surrounded, fenced in, impossible to reach,” De los Santos said. “But here we arrive in Cuba and a revolutionary, socialist, honest, humane President receives us openly and wants to listen to our questions.”

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.