An American government employee who was imprisoned in Cuba for five years is claiming Sen. Bernie Sanders told him he didn’t understand criticism of the communist country.
Alan Gross, 70, who was working in the country as a U.S. Agency for International Development subcontractor, was imprisoned in Cuba on charges of spying for the United States in 2009. Sanders and two other senators held a one-hour meeting with the then-prisoner in 2014 when they visited Cuba as part of a congressional delegation.
“He said, quote: ‘I don’t know what’s so wrong with this country,'” Gross told NPR in an interview Wednesday.
Gross previously discussed the meeting, alluding to the alleged Sanders comments, in 2016 with Politico. He immediately backtracked, however, later explaining that he “didn’t really think it was all that relevant” to the interview he was giving.
“I had the impression that Bernie didn’t see that there was so much wrong with the country that he was visiting,” Gross said then, before adding: “Oh, no, no, no. Not really. Not really. He didn’t say so much as that.”
Now he’s back, claiming Sanders did, in fact, say he was confused as to why people found faults with the country.
“The first year of my captivity was akin to sensory deprivation, because, well, I saw about 20 minutes of sunlight during the first year,” Gross told NPR, adding that he lost 100 pounds and five teeth while in prison and that guards threatened to pull out his fingernails and hang him.
Sanders caught flak in February for comments defending Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s regime during a 60 Minutes interview.
“It’s unfair to simply say everything is bad” about the late dictator and his regime, the Vermont senator told host Anderson Cooper.
“When Fidel Castro came to office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?” he added.
His comments sparked rage Miami’s “Little Havana” among Hispanic American voters, who said they were “very insulting” to the people who escaped communist dictatorships to come to America.
“He has turned off all of the Cuban population in Miami, and I would venture to say the Venezuelan population, Nicaraguan population, because of those comments that he has made,” said Maria Fernandez Gomez, a Cuban American.
