Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders warmly praised Cuba and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after visiting each, dismissing “horrors” in Cuba as right-wing propaganda and praising Soviet infrastructure even as dictatorship prevailed and the country was on the verge of collapse.
The new revelations were uncovered by a Washington Examiner investigation of archives at the University of Vermont containing papers from the time Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt.
The documents reveal that Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, evinced enthusiasm for the two communist regimes.
In 1989, Sanders effusively praised the “Cuban revolution” in a public statement from the mayor’s office.
“For better or for worse, the Cuban revolution is a very profound and very deep revolution. Much deeper than I had understood,” Sanders wrote. “More interesting than their providing their people with free health care, free education, free housing … is that they are in fact creating a very different value system than the one we are familiar with.”
Sanders mocked the notion that Cuba was an undesirable place to live, chalking up criticisms of the island nation as right-wing propaganda.
“Right-wing citizens could come back [from visiting] with first-hand evidence of all the horrors in Cuba, etc., etc,” Sanders wrote dismissively.
He called for an end of the travel ban enacted by the U.S. government.
In notes attached to a draft of the remarks, Sanders highlighted what he perceives as strengths of the Cuban regime, which includes their system of “democracy,” as well as state-provided housing and healthcare.
Had Sanders scheduled his trip a year and a half later, he would have witnessed what is known as “Período especial,” or “The Special Period in Time of Peace,” which was a nearly decade-long economic crisis that resulted in famine. From 1990-1995, Cuban adults lost an average of 5% to 25% of their body weight, according to a study from the National Institute of Health.
A year earlier Sanders lauded the infrastructure he had found in Moscow.
“There are some things that [the Soviet Union does] better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive. Subway systems in in Moscow costs 5 kopecs — or 7 cents. Faster, cleaner, more attractive and more efficient than any in the U.S. — and cheap,” an official statement from the Burlington’s office reads. “The train trip that we took from Leningrad to Moscow — for Soviet citizens — was very cheap.” Sanders then went on to praise “programs for youth and workers” that he saw during the trip.
Sanders also likened Soviet problems in “health care, environmental protection, and agriculture” to those in the United States.
“Further, like the United States, Soviet industry is lagging behind in terms of technological breakthroughs, re-tooling, and plant investment,” Sanders wrote in May, 1988.
Yet, experts on the Soviet Union say that Sanders drew a misleading picture for the people of Burlington.
“How skewed someone’s perception can be on what they’re observing. There were people in the West who unfortunately genuinely believed the Soviet Union was better at some things than the West, like infrastructure,” Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Examiner. “People like Sanders don’t realize what the cost of tickets meant in the context of Soviet society. Nothing was ‘free.'”
“When I lived in the Soviet Union, everything was falling apart. People don’t realize how many people Stalin killed by building the Moscow subway station. Sure, the trains worked, but that other factor is dismissed. I have no doubt Bernie was sincere in what he said, but there was a whole disregard for life and safety in every aspect of Soviet life, including infrastructure,” Borschevkaya said.
Three years after Sanders praised its infrastructure and said its problems were similar to those of the U.S., the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
