Rep. Karen Bass is walking back comments from four years ago praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro now that she is being considered as a potential vice presidential pick for Joe Biden.
In a statement following Castro’s death in 2016, Bass referred to him as “Comandante en Jefe” or commander in chief in Spanish.
A Politico report that mentioned the statement sparked outrage among the Cuban American community, especially in South Florida.
“I have talked to my colleagues in the House about that, and it’s certainly something that I would not say again,” Bass said during an interview on MSNBC Sunday. “I have always supported the Cuban people, and the relationship that Barack Obama and Biden had in their administration in terms of opening up relations.”
Bass, a Democrat, is reportedly one of several minority women being vetted as a potential running mate for Biden, the party’s presumptive nominee for president. Biden has promised to pick a woman of color as his vice president.
Bass has criticized the branding behind the Black Lives Matter movement, whose co-founder described herself as a “trained Marxist,” and disavowed calls from more liberal members to defund the police.
“I told some friends that’s probably one of the worst slogans ever,” Bass said last month. “Police officers are the first ones to say r are law enforcement officers. They’re not social workers. What we have done in our country is, we have not invested in health, social, and economic problems in communities. We leave the police to pick up the pieces.”
President Trump has attempted to paint Biden as beholden to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party and suggested he is scheming with former primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist.
Sanders was hit with similar criticism from the Cuban American community after he offered similar praise of Castro during an interview with 60 Minutes earlier this year.
“But you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad,” Sanders said. “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?”
This week, Bass called Castro’s time in power over Cuba “very troubling.”
“I happen to believe that sometimes the best way to change a regime is through having relations versus not,” she said. “For a country that is 90 miles away, for a policy that we’ve had decades [and] hasn’t worked, I think opening up relationships is the best way to go … But I certainly understand the sensitivity and, to me saying that, the understanding that the translation in Spanish communicated something completely different. Lesson learned.”
