There are two ways to misinterpret the comments Bernie Sanders made in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on Sunday night. When asked by the host, Anderson Cooper, to explain his long-ago praise of the achievements of Fidel Castro’s regime, in Cuba, Sanders said, “We are very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba. But, you know, it’s unfair to simply say, ‘Everything is bad.’ When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?”
One way to spin these statements is to say that Sanders has finally been exposed as the socialist bogeyman that President Donald Trump and the Democratic contender Michael Bloomberg have been invoking, and that, if elected, Sanders will destroy the American way of life in favor of Soviet-style totalitarianism. This was the predictable reaction from the right. The predictable corollary from the left was to say, in effect, that Sanders is right: Cuba has the best education record in Latin America, and universal health care, too.
And then there was a third reaction. The writer Ana Simo responded to the interview with a two-word comment on Facebook: “Moral stupidity.” Another writer, Achy Obejas, commented, “ . . . And there goes Florida . . . ” Halfway across the world, the artist Tania Bruguera got off a plane in Milan, where she is mounting a show, and told me by phone that she “saw the news and thought, Oh, my God.”
These were not expressions of glee. None of these artists is a right-wing ideologue—all three are outspoken progressives, out lesbians, and potential Sanders voters. All three are also Cuban. Simo fled Castro’s homophobic purges as a young woman, in the late sixties, landed in Paris, and later moved to New York. Bruguera divides her time between New York, international travel, and Havana, where her work has been censored and she has been arrested for her art and her activism. Obejas came to the United States with her parents when she was a child, in 1962. She told me on the phone that she doesn’t call herself a socialist, though her political beliefs probably fit the label. But, she said, “It’s quite another thing to consider voting for someone who thinks that a place that caused my parents so much pain is not just O.K. but exemplary in some ways.”
Simo and Obejas are refugees from totalitarianism, as am I. In making his comments, Sanders stepped into the gap that separates the American-born left from those of us who came here from totalitarian countries. The regimes we fled did their best to discredit Marxism, socialism, and leftist ideas in general. To a large extent, they succeeded. When I was growing up, my parents believed, and taught me, that the attempt to build a state in accordance with Marxist ideals—or, really, any attempt to create a society in which everyone contributed what they could and received what they needed—was doomed to produce a totalitarian dystopia. We longed to escape to a land ruled by the blissful and, it seemed to us, natural union of capitalism and freedom.
In the U.S., some of us commenced the long journey to a more complicated view of capitalism. At the other end of this journey lay the realization that capitalism and democracy may not be a match made in heaven, and the hypothesis, supported by the example of Western social democracies, that socialist ideas may yield a freer and fairer society. These discoveries suggested that socialist ideas can and ought to be decoupled from the totalitarian nightmare of our past—indeed, that those totalitarian regimes, whatever they might have written on their banners, had very little to do with those ideas.
Both Obejas and Bruguera told me that Sanders’s reference to the sixty-year-old literacy campaign (for which both of their mothers volunteered) was particularly painful. Obejas explained how distant it is from contemporary Cuban reality, which is plagued by a shortage of teachers and doctors. Like the Soviet Union, Cuban society is profoundly stratified. These are essentially exploitative societies—each is no more socialist than war is peace, freedom is slavery, or ignorance is strength.
But such is the power of Cold War framing—and such is the power of Soviet propaganda—that the decoupling of totalitarianism from socialism has not happened in American political culture. The right and the left both essentially continue to believe that the Soviet Union and its satellite, Castro’s Cuba, were socialist states. On the right, this has meant equating the ideas with the totalitarian nightmare. On the left, it has led to erasing or minimizing the nightmare.
Sanders was guilty of minimizing, and even idealizing, these regimes when he talked about Cuba in the early nineteen-eighties, and the U.S.S.R., after his visit there in 1988. His infatuation with the Soviet Union was both understandable and forgivable. He visited just as perestroika was kicking into gear; it was a moment of unprecedented openness and self-criticism in Soviet society, and Sanders described this mood eloquently at a press conference following his trip. Perhaps more important, Sanders was then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, not a federal official or a candidate for national office. If he wanted to be bamboozled, it was his right and his personal choice.
In making this choice, Sanders acted in a way that has long been characteristic of some members of the American left, who gloss over the crimes of totalitarian regimes as though they were footnotes to a greater story, or jokes. This tendency is typified by one of New York’s literary dive bars, KGB Bar, where I have missed many a friend’s book launch or reading because, as I always have to explain, I can no more see myself spending time there than I can see myself drinking at a bar named for, say, the S.S. (“It’s in no way pro-Soviet,” a friend recently assured me. Imagine explaining away a Nazi name that way.)
Similarly, imagine Sanders saying that the Nazis were terrible but they had great cancer-prevention programs. Such a statement would be factually true. It would also be unconscionable, because the nature of totalitarianism is to rob every one of its subjects of agency, dignity, and humanity. (Sanders, whose extended family suffered greatly in the Holocaust, would certainly understand this.) That a person who has been so robbed has also been protected from cancer, or taught to read, does not fall into a category of good or even “not bad” things. “Yes, they taught us to read and write,” Bruguera told me on the phone. “And then they forbade us to read what we want and write what we think.” She said that she has written to the Sanders campaign to ask to come and talk about Cuba; as of Tuesday afternoon, she had not heard back. (I also contacted the campaign for comment and have not heard back.)
What Sanders could have said, and should have said, is that totalitarianism, that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. But it should not discredit the ideas of common welfare and basic fairness that make up socialism. Totalitarianism can weaponize any ideology; socialism is no more essentially totalitarian than capitalism is essentially democratic. This would have been at once factually true and true to the politics that Sanders has espoused.
Instead, during a CNN town hall on Monday evening, Sanders doubled down on his praise of Castro’s sixty-year-old literacy program. Then, he added, “China is another example. It’s an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian. But can anyone deny—I mean, the facts are clear—that they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history?” I could almost hear the collective gasp of many Chinese-American voters, who also stand on my side of the great unbridgeable gap. It’s as if Sanders didn’t realize that all of these good things that he cites—literacy, public medicine, access to culture and public transportation, and being lifted out of poverty—are good because they create the conditions for human dignity, which is precisely what totalitarianism destroys.
