Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | March 22, 2026
meme

Some things are so absurd that if you wrote them into a script, people couldn't suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the movie. 

The leftist "convoy to Cuba" fits that category. 

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Code Pink, the left-wing activist group directly associated with the Chinese Communist Party, arranged an "aid convoy" to Cuba in which the participants traveled to the poverty-stricken island to enjoy a tourist experience as the population around them suffers in blackouts. 

As far as I can tell, some of the last few actual communists on the planet are privileged and overeducated trust-fund babies who believe that "misgendering" somebody is oppression, but one-party states that have spent decades oppressing their citizens are the height of democracy.

Despite the fact that the regime is giving them a highly curated experience of what life in Cuba is like, it's impossible to hide the abject poverty because it is nearly universal. The lights are out for everybody but the regime, and each of these people live-streaming their wonderful experience from 5-star hotels can look out the window and see a city that is almost completely dark. 

Their explanation for this discrepancy? Capitalism did this. The all-powerful capitalists have crippled an otherwise perfect regime. 

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Which begs the question: why do communist regimes require the aid of capitalist ones? 

You can't make it up. 

Another member of this so-called “youth brigade,” despite being 39, is Madeline Pendleton — a massively influential fashion TikToker, Penguin Random House author, and CEO of Tunnel Vision.

If you want a sense of the ideology she is bringing with her to Cuba, here she is telling her audience, “My hope is that by the end of the story, you will side with North Korea as well,” and “You guys know North Korea is basically another Palestine, right?”

For someone already laundering North Korean propaganda for a mass audience, Cuba is hardly a stretch.

She also appears to have used her @Twitch audience to help fund the trip — posting on Instagram that her subscribers from last month “paid for” additional support for the convoy.

Fashion influencers, Twitch streamers, podcast hosts, and NGO-funded idiots are lecturing not just gullible Americans about economics and politics, but the Cuban people themselves, telling them they should be grateful to groan under the oppression of communism. 

The love of communism stems from the same root as the current love affair the left has with Islamists: it has little to do with the ideology of or results created by their models, and everything to do with their ideological commitment to destroy the West. 

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Their resentment of the West stems from a sense, I believe, that they deserve to have all the power, just as they enjoy a disproportionate share of the wealth that capitalism creates. They produce nothing, contribute nothing, are the product of elite education systems, and wonder why they don't have more prestige than they do. 

It must be oppression. 

The irony is that every single one of these people, if they tried to do the same thing in a communist country, would wind up in jail or executed. 


































































BEST OF THE BABYLON BEE:


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BEST OF THE REST


A railway company in Japan once ran out of money to pay a stationmaster. So they gave the job to the cat who lived outside the station. She wore a custom made hat, worked for cat food, and saved the entire line.

Her name was Tama. She was a calico cat who had spent her days sitting near the entrance of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, greeting passengers anyway. When the company destaffed the station in 2006 to cut costs, the president visited to discuss what to do about the stray cats living nearby. He looked into Tama's eyes and later said they conveyed a sense of purpose as strong as any of his employees.

He made her stationmaster.

Within a month passenger numbers rose by seventeen percent. People began travelling from across Japan just to see her. Tourists arrived from other countries. A French documentary crew came to film her. The station was eventually rebuilt in the shape of a cat's face.

In her eight years as stationmaster Tama contributed an estimated one billion yen to the local economy. She was promoted four times. She eventually held the title of Honorary President of the railway. The only female in a senior position in the entire company.

When she passed away in 2015 over three thousand people attended her funeral. She was given the posthumous title Honorary Eternal Stationmaster and enshrined at a nearby Shinto shrine as a goddess.

The position of stationmaster at Kishi Station is still held by a cat today.

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