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The organization Open Arms announced this Wednesday that its ship Astral will depart from Barcelona on May 10 heading to Cuba with photovoltaic panels intended for the Juan Manuel Márquez Pediatric Hospital in Havana, in what its organizers are calling the "Heading to Cuba" mission.
The journey, as reported by ElDiario.es, will make stops in Valencia, Málaga, Cádiz, and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria before crossing the Atlantic, with scheduled stages between May 13 and May 28. The entire mission will last approximately one month.
The most striking detail is not the cargo, but the passengers. On each leg, up to four individuals will board, including public officials, cultural figures, and influencers, who will accompany the crew from port to port along the Spanish coast.
The campaign was launched in March in front of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid, featuring participation from the director of Open Arms, Óscar Camps, as well as politicians from Sumar, Podemos, Bildu, and the Comunes, along with journalist Teresa Aranguren. Among the supporters are Pablo Iglesias, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap.
Camps justified the initiative by recalling the presence of Cuban doctors in international emergencies. "The time has come to reciprocate that practice with actions and return a part of that solidarity wherever we can contribute," he declared.
The mission is part of a series of similar initiatives that, in the past two months, have brought hundreds of international leftist activists to Cuba. In March, the “Convoy Nuestra América” arrived with between 500 and 650 activists from 33 countries on board the ship Maguro, dubbed “Granma 2.0,” while the Cuban population endured power outages of up to 20 hours a day.
Criticism came swiftly. Journalist Yoani Sánchez was direct: "We are not a theme park. Go do ideological tourism elsewhere. Here, we are suffering." Cubans on social media summarized the public sentiment with phrases like "I see a lot of mouths and little food" or "The people don't even see that passing by."
In April, a second convoy, named "Primero de Mayo," arrived with about 60 activists from Italy, France, the United States, and Mexico, coordinated by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples. The XIX International Brigade Primero de Mayo gathered over 200 activists from 19 countries during the same period.
The pattern repeats: minimal material aid in the face of the depth of the crisis, a strong component of political activism, and figures from the international left that the regime uses to project its narrative abroad, all while the Cuban people continue to live without electricity.
In addition to Open Arms, the mission includes Ecologistas en Acción, the energy cooperative Ecooo Energía Ciudadana, and a dozen associations and unions. A recent study attributes the increase in infant mortality in Cuba to the embargo, although the island's structural crisis has accumulated 67 years of dictatorial management that no convoy has managed to reverse.
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