Feeling the Bern on Castro connection
Bernie Sanders is a messianic sort of character, in the sense that his followers will accept his words as received wisdom. They do not question, do not differ, do not equivocate. Bernie is a minor god in the political galaxy known as these United States.
In some ways he is similar to Donald Trump, who has more often been compared to a cult leader. He himself once noted, partially in jest and partially in recognition of a certain segment of his most fervent followers, that he could shoot someone in Times Square and they’d support him.
Hyperbole aside, both men have passionate acolytes, more devoted at a granular level than the followers of Hillary, Obama, or any of the other Democratic candidates running for the nomination this cycle.
Bernie is getting some justifiable attention for his bizarre attraction to Fidel Castro, a man who imprisoned the relatives of some of my asylum clients, killed others, tortured political dissidents and forced Catholics and other people of faith to either flee, or tremble before their creeds and crucifixes in the dark recesses of their homes.
Castro was an evil man, a crude man, a man who was either born without a soul or traded that eternal commodity to the devil in exchange for eight decades of venal, brutal power. But Bernie has always had good things to say about Castro. In a 1985 interview, given at a time when the dictator was at the height of his power and tyrannical authority, Sanders praised the Cuban despot for health care reform and the educational opportunities he was making available to his people. Years later, he praised Hugo Chavez, himself a Castro acolyte, for his “reforms,” which have resulted in a mass exodus from the once richest country in South America. I personally represent in their asylum proceedings a number of these self-exiled Venezuelans who have been preyed upon by a government that followed, to the letter, the Castro model.
I asked some of those clients, including a few from Cuba, what they thought of Bernie’s repeated insistence that the health care reforms in their native countries balanced out the horrors they had experienced. I wanted to know if a free education and free health care made up for the fact that they had lost their homes, that their fathers had been jailed for decades, that they were prevented from practicing their professions unless they belonged to the Communist Party. To a person, they said that free health care meant nothing if they were healthy, but enslaved. To a person, they said that a free education was useless if it meant they had to follow the dictates of “Hermano Grande,” Big Brother.
It is difficult for anyone who has not actually been in contact with a refugee from a totalitarian regime to grasp the magnitude of the dehumanizing impact on the soul. My friend Dasha Pruett who is running for Mary Gay Scanlon’s seat in Congress, spent the first decade of her life in Soviet Russia, and told me that ““the socialist vision of government controlling every aspect of our lives is not only upsetting, but disturbing.” I was grateful that Dasha used the phrase “socialism” as a synonym for totalitarianism, because Bernie is trying to put a shiny bow on a truly dangerous concept, “socialism with a human face,” as the Communists in Czechoslovakia said right before they started imprisoning and killing dissidents like Vaclav Havel.
Bernie Sanders’ followers might dismiss as hyperbole and exaggeration the idea that their “dear leader” is an acolyte of tyrannical beliefs. They will continue to drone on about how free health care and free educations are the birthright of all human beings, that the government is our friend, that capitalism is evil and that anyone who attacks Bernie wants sick children to die and young people to live crushed under a burden of insurmountable debt.
But we have been privy to interview after interview, instance after instance, example after example of a man who has been able to cull from the sulfurous depths of horror a few pearls of pleasure and virtue, a few instances where people were actually able to get free dental care or a doctoral degree (and then make $30 a month practicing their profession.) The fact that he persists in trying to find the “human face of socialism” should be proof enough that we do not want, nor do we need, to see his own face anywhere near the White House.