Bernie Sanders Is Partly Right About Cuba

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has come under fire for praising a 1960s-era Cuban literacy drive and other social-welfare programs. Critics, including fellow candidate Mike Bloomberg (majority owner of Bloomberg LP, publisher of Bloomberg Opinion), have assailed Sanders for saying good things about an authoritarian regime. The disagreement has sparked a wider argument about how Americans should think about Cuba’s record since the communist takeover of the late 1950s. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes.

Praising the successes of an authoritarian regime is always fraught with peril. Such regimes tend to inflate their performance by issuing fake or distorted statistics. And it’s easy for onlookers to conflate praise for a specific program with praise for a regime in general. Although Sanders has repeatedly condemned Cuba’s authoritarianism, opportunistic propagandists will inevitably try to use his limited praise of education and health programs to support their argument for one-party systems over pluralistic democratic ones. No one should forget how Cuban dictator Fidel Castro threw gays into concentration camps and imprisoned political dissidents.