President Barack Obama jokes with Sen. Bernard Sanders, Ind-Vt., and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., right, following lunch with Senators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Aug. 4, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Despite Bernie Sanders’s penchant for touting Fidel Castro’s massive literacy program in Cuba when Fidel came into office, there are some serious flaws in the Vermont Senator’s thinking, reports the WSJ.
Before the 1959 revolution, some 80% of Cuba could read. That put the island’s education level far ahead of most of its Latin American neighbors. In the ensuing six decades, many countries in the region have moved to near-universal literacy.
The difference is that countries like Ecuador and Colombia, both of which came from much further behind, did it without having “totally transformed the society” with firing squads, dungeons, torture and exile. They did it without stealing private property and driving Cubans into poverty or rafts to escape to America.
Cuba Middle Class and Literate before the Revolution
Cuba has gone from being one of the more advanced countries in the region in the mid-1950s to one of the most impoverished, and the reason is its economic socialism and political tyranny.
Fidel Castro’s Super Fan
The issue for voters today is what it says about Mr. Sanders that, even after so many years of cruel evidence, he still feels compelled to insist there is a silver lining in the Cuban revolution.
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