Bernie Doubles Down On His Support Of Fidel Castro; ‘Not Everything Was Bad’
During an interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” far-left socialist Senator and 2020 Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders praised Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
The comments came when Cooper asked Sanders about the comments he had made in the 1980s when he praised Castro. Sanders made it clear that his feelings towards the communist dictator had not changed.
“We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba,” Sanders said to Cooper. “But it's unfair to say that everything is bad.”
Sanders then continued by showing Castro with his praises: “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Check out what The Blaze reported:
While it is true that Castro implemented a reading program on the island after seizing power in a bloody revolution in 1959, Cuba's literacy rate was already high for a Latin American nation at the time and its educational gains have been comparable to those of its peers in the years since.
As attorney Hans Bader noted in an August 2016 article, nearly eight out of 10 Cubans already knew how to read by 1950. This figure was similar to that of Costa Rica, which also achieved 100 percent literacy over the following decades — except Costa Rica and other countries did so without the kind of Marxist dictatorship that Cubans have endured under the Castro regime for over 61 years.
On Sunday night, Dr. Andy Gomez who leads Cuban Studies at the University of Miami, reached out to The Blaze to inform them that Sanders was misleading voters about Castros motives.
“Contrary to what Senator Bernie Sanders said, the literacy campaign used by the Castro regime was part of their strategic plan to indoctrinate the Cuban people by using education at all levels in support of a Marxist ideology,” Gomez said.
The Blaze continues:
As National Review's Jay Nordlinger noted, in 1986 former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares was asked at a Harvard forum about Cuba's literacy rate and other supposed accomplishments of the island's communist revolution. He responded by noting that not only are many of the regime's claims false, even if they were true, they came at the expense of basic human freedoms and dignity.
“Say all those things are true. They're not, but just say they are. Can't you have those things without torturing people? Can't you have them without wrongly imprisoning them? Can't you have them without killing them? Without denying them rights? Without forbidding them to speak freely, without forbidding them to worship, without forbidding them to vote and have a normal political life and pursue their own destinies, and so on? Why is material well-being — not that Cuba has it, or anything remotely like it — but why is material well-being incompatible with freedom? Or not even with freedom: with the absence of a stifling, horrid dictatorship? Why?”
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