While Democrats such as Bernie Sanders preach the virtues of socialism, remember the wisdom of a respected leader still suffering under it.
Sanders has repeatedly defended his decadeslong admiration for the authoritarian communist regime in Cuba. At the same time, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, human rights leader, and former political prisoner Oscar Elias Biscet was being detained by Cuba’s state security at his home in Havana.
“Sanders claims to be a socialist, but he has not lived socialism,” Biscet told me. “Sanders touts the benefits of the Castro regime, but he does not know or truly understand the repressive and criminal nature of this regime.”
What was Biscet’s crime? According to the paperwork that he sent me, he was fined 500 pesos and detained for over 9 hours for the “illegal reception of objects.” It’s not that Biscet received illegal objects (in this case, a computer and phone), but his crime was receiving the objects illegally — meaning he received a computer and phone without government knowledge.
This experience is nothing new for Biscet. He has been arrested or detained well over 30 times and has spent over 12 years of his life in Cuba’s notoriously violent prison system. Biscet’s sentences have been served in prisons such as Combinado de Este outside Havana and the infamous “Cinco y Medio” prison in Pinar Del Rio, where outside visitors are not allowed, and governmental retribution is levied through physical and psychological torture.
Biscet’s experience last week is also not new for the tens of thousands of Cubans who have been detained and imprisoned for such petty crimes as accessing the internet from a phone, living in Havana without a permit, and entering tourist-only hotels and resorts.
An optimistic Sanders, who has a habit of brushing aside Cuba’s horrendous human rights record, might argue that this small fine and day trip to the local state security center (it’s not even a long trip since they exist on almost every block) is an improvement on the three-year sentence Biscet received in 1999 for dishonoring a national symbol (hanging the Cuban flag upside down as a sign of distress).
It’s also a huge improvement over the 25-year sentence Biscet received in 2003 for disorderly conduct and counter-revolutionary activities. Biscet, a staunch believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, was arrested on his way to a human rights meeting.
But while Biscet lives the brutal reality of socialism’s crimes, Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders would like us to disconnect these horrendous crimes from what the Cuban government has been able to provide its subjects. Of course, the government’s role is to provide as much as possible to the people. These provisions include free or low-cost healthcare, a high literacy rate, and a low infant mortality rate.
However, even if the fruits of an authoritarian regime were beneficial to those suffering under it, it seems more than inappropriate for a candidate for president to highlight a regime that denies its citizens the principles we hold as most valuable: freedom of speech, the rule of law, separation of powers, and many more.
What is often lost in what Sanders claims regarding Cuba’s literacy rate, cost of healthcare, or infant mortality rate, is the accuracy of those claims. Many, including Sanders, have for decades been quoting statistics that are almost impossible to verify within an island nation controlled by a totalitarian regime.
Luckily, over the years, a small group of brave and dedicated individuals have risked everything to reveal the truth behind the myths pushed out by Cuba’s Communist Party and those outside Cuba that amplify those myths. Biscet is one of those individuals.
For example, Sanders and the Cuban government often tout Cuba’s low infant mortality rate as a sign of socialism’s success. If we believe the numbers coming out of Havana, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the U.S.
But, as Biscet, a medical doctor, revealed in the late 1990s, this isn’t true.
The truth got Biscet expelled from Cuba’s National Health System in 1998. The truth is that Cuba routinely forces women to abort babies who show signs of prenatal abnormalities. Just like that, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is the envy of the world! This reality is a microcosm of Cuban socialism.
I have traveled to Cuba on numerous occasions. I have traveled through many parts of Havana, as well as cities and villages throughout the country, including Santa Clara, Camaguey, Las Tunas, and Santiago de Cuba. I have spoken with everyday people and opposition leaders alike. Certain realities slowly start to reveal themselves the longer you spend in Cuba.
Poverty is easy to see and in many ways it is easy to understand. But fear and hopelessness, especially government-induced fear and hopelessness, are difficult to spot for someone who has lived in freedom their whole life. It’s entirely unrelatable and foreign.
Many Americans express fear of the future or a lack of hope in our government institutions. But the fear and hopelessness I saw and felt in Cuba is very different.
For example, when talking in public with Cubans on the island, I would notice their eyes as they darted all over the place. Their eyes are never fixed on you, they are continually searching — searching for the secret police, searching for the local community leaders in charge of being the eyes and ears of the regime. Their eyes are even searching among their friends and family, because they must be careful what they say at all times.
Just as the Cuban government indoctrinates its population in a multitude of ways, including their stifling education system, they seem to have done the same with Sanders from afar by creating a myth of their ideology.
As Biscet succinctly puts it, “Socialism teaches you to read and write, but it’s indoctrination. It will send you to prison for having books contrary to their ideology. Socialism will seize your literature and computers for writing about the basic ideals of human rights, democracy, and freedom.”
Biscet summarized for me in the following way his 50-plus years of living under a political system more and more Americans desire to have: “Socialism is hunger, misery, and calamity. It destroys everything: the family, civil society, the rule of law, and so much more.”
The destruction of the family, civil society (nongovernmental organizations, including religious institutions), and the rule of law that holds political elites accountable. It makes you wonder whether Sanders has been duped and is truly uneducated about the realities of socialism or whether he knows exactly what the realities are.
No matter what happens in the coming months, Bernie Sanders will never live under a socialist regime. But if he has his way, he will be the one ruling on top.
Jordan Allott is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of In Altum Productions, and produced the documentary Oscar’s Cuba about the life of Dr. Oscar Biscet in 2010.
