By Mona Charen
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
According to CNN, Bernie Sanders “has been consistent for
40 years.” Some find this reassuring. Bernie is not a finger-in-the-wind
politician who tacks this way or that depending upon what’s popular. On the
other hand, if someone has never changed his mind throughout 78 years of life,
it suggests ideological rigidity and imperviousness to evidence, not high
principle.
Why make a fuss about Bernie’s past praise of Communist
dictatorships? After all, the Cold War ended three decades ago, and a would-be
President Sanders cannot exactly surrender to the Soviet Union.
It’s a moral issue. Sanders was not a liberal during the
Cold War, i.e. someone who favored arms control, peace talks, and opposed
support for anti-Communist movements. He was an outright Communist sympathizer,
meaning he was always willing to overlook or excuse the crimes of regimes like
Cuba and Nicaragua; always ready to suggest that only American hostility forced
them to, among other things, arrest their opposition, expel priests, and
dispense with elections.
Good ol’ consistent Bernie reprised one of the greatest
hits of the pro-Castro Left last week on 60 Minutes. When Anderson
Cooper pressed the senator by noting that Castro imprisoned a lot of
dissidents, Sanders said he condemned such things. But even that grudging
acknowledgment rankled the old socialist, who then rushed to add, “When Fidel
Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy
program. Is that a bad thing?”
Actually, the first thing Castro did upon seizing power
(note Sanders’s whitewashing term “came into office”) was to march 600 of
Fulgencio Batista’s supporters into two of the island’s largest prisons, La
Cabana and Santa Clara. Over the next five months, after rigged trials, they
were shot. Some “trials” amounted to public spectacles. A crowd of 18,000
gathered in the Palace of Sports to give a thumbs-down gesture for Jesus Sosa
Blanco. Before he was shot, Sosa Blanco noted that ancient Rome couldn’t have
done it better.
Batista was a bad guy, one must say. But summary
executions are frowned upon by true liberals.
Next, Castro announced that scheduled elections would be
postponed indefinitely. The island is still waiting. Within months, he began to
close independent newspapers, even some that had supported him during the
insurgency. All religious colleges were shuttered in May 1961, their property
confiscated by the state. N.B., Senator Sanders: Castro also found time to
knee-cap the labor unions. David Salvador, the elected leader of the
sugar-workers union had been a vocal Batista opponent. He was arrested in 1962
and would spend twelve years in Cuba’s gulag.
The Black Book of Communism recounts that between
1959 and 1999, more than 100,000 Cubans were imprisoned for political reasons,
and between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot. Neighbors were encouraged to
inform on one another and children on their parents. During the AIDS crisis of
the 1980s, Cuba imprisoned gay people in concentration camps. Like other
Communist paradises, Cuba’s greatest export was boat people. About two million
of the island’s 11 million inhabitants escaped. Countless others died in the
attempt. Did Sanders ever wonder why a country that had done such great work on
literacy and health care had to shoot people to prevent them from fleeing?
Bernie Sanders has credulously repeated the other great
propaganda talking point about Cuba: its supposedly wonderful “universal”
health-care system. It’s not wonderful. Even those wishing to give Cuba the
benefit of the doubt note the lack of basic necessities.
Many hospitals in the country lack even reliable electricity and clean running
water. A 2016 visitor
found that patients in one Havana hospital had to bring everything with them —
medicine, sheets, towels, etc.
The only working bathroom in the entire hospital had only
one toilet. The door didn’t close, so you had to go with people outside
watching. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found, and the floor was far from
clean.
Yes, Cuba has high rates of literacy, but the state
wanted readers in order to propagandize them. Granma tells people what
to believe and forbids access to other sources of information. To this day, the
regime controls what people can know. There are two Internets on the island.
One for tourists and those approved by the government and the other, with
restricted access, for the people.
Bernie Sanders has access to all the information he can
absorb, and yet he remains an apologist for regimes that violate every standard
of decency. Unlike the Cuban people, he is responsible for his own ignorance
and pig-headedness. He claims to be a “democratic socialist,” but as his Cuba
remarks suggest, the modifier may be just for show.
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