How do Cuban Americans feel about Sanders ‘60 Minutes’ interview?
When Sergio Rodriguez Sr. — a 78-yearold former political prisoner in Cuba — heard presidential contender Bernie Sanders say that it is “simply unfair to say everything is bad” about Fidel Castro’s revolution, his reaction wasn’t one of indignation.
Instead, he thought that Sanders, the candidate he supports in the 2020 presidential race, was spot on.
“In this case, what Bernie said was the truth,” Rodriguez said. “In Cuba, workingclass people like me gained a lot at the beginning of the revolution.”
For Rodriguez, criticism of Sanders from many exiles and local lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, amounts to “opportunistic” political posturing.
“Their comments didn’t surprise me,” he said. “A lot of it comes from an old Cuban generation, old like me, that settled in Miami. They have a different mentality.
They haven’t been able to evolve.”
Rodriguez said he knows it seems unusual for someone like him to back Sanders at a time when 76 percent of
Cuban-American seniors are Republican, according to a Florida International University Cuba poll.
In fact, he says he recently had a fallout with a longtime friend after he confessed his support for the Vermont senator and defended the controversial position on Cuba that Sanders staked out during a “60 Minutes” appearance last month.
But Rodriguez says he won’t be lectured on the dangers of authoritarian communism.
“My friend moved to the U.S. from Cuba early on,” he said. “Meanwhile, I was still there, locked up for actually fighting against communism.”
As a young man in Cuba, Rodriguez joined the counter-revolutionary Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (MRR), which sought to fight communism and return democracy to the island. It didn’t go well. Rodriguez was caught, charged with conspiracy, and wound up spending 17 years behind bars in Cuba, only regaining his freedom and coming to Miami in the early 1980s, after diplomatic maneuvers by the Carter administration helped engineer the release of more than 3,000 political prisoners.
Rodriguez’s 34-year-old son, also named Sergio and also a Sanders supporter, says he is proud of his father’s ability to recognize both the negative and the more positive aspects of Castro’s legacy, despite the longlasting trauma he still battles as a former prisoner.
“My father lost his actual freedom,” he said. “But even he doesn’t have that closed-minded, knee-jerk emotional reaction that most of the Cuban exile commu
nity has” when it comes to America’s Cuba policy. “He obviously is not a Castro supporter, but he could still never really fit in anywhere with the Cuban-American community here. ... He has a perspective that is nuanced and isn’t charged by emotion. He’s able to acknowledge some of the good that came out of the Cuban revolution.”
According to the younger Rodriguez, a nuanced perspective is what was on display when Sanders answered the Castro question on “60 Minutes.”
“I thought it was common sense,” he said of the remarks, which the senator has since repeated. “I took no offense whatsoever, because he made the clear distinction that Castro and his regime violated human rights, and there’s no liberty in Cuba, no freedom of speech. But a lot of people were lifted out of abject poverty and were able to eat, and learn to read, and go to school.
“It’s not black-andwhite,” he said. “There’s a lot of gray.”
It was the topic of reading, and, specifically, Sanders’ praise of a more than 50-year-old literacy program on “60 Minutes” that sparked the backlash.
“When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program,” the Vermont senator said. “Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
The remarks led to an examination of the literacy drive’s legacy. Fact-checkers held that the program, which was carried out by hundreds of thousands of young volunteer teachers, helped drive down the illiteracy race in Cuba to 3.9% by 1961, down from 23.6% in 1959. Critics pointed out that the teaching and reading materials used were vehicles for government propaganda.
For Andy Vila, an FIU student who moved to the United States from Cuba in 2004, the subject “was pretty personal.”
“I grew up with the stories of my grandmothers who are both teachers, and who were both involved in the literacy program,” he said. Their work “helping educate the poor and primarily black people in Cuba who couldn’t read ... makes me happy and makes me proud
of where I come from.”
Vila says he doesn’t identify with those offended by Sanders’ remarks.
“I understand that people have this deep belief that every single Cuban is going crazy about this but I’m telling you for those of us who are recent migrants, and for those of us who were poor before the revolution, we don’t look at it the same way,” he said.
“It’s like, we get it, we wouldn’t want Bernie to be an authoritarian socialist but that’s not what he was talking about. For my family, he was just talking about the literacy program, he wasn’t talking about whatever bad things Castro did, which he denounced.”
In a statement, the Sanders’ campaign pushed back on the narrative that the
“60 Minutes” comments could be considered praise for Castro.
“Sen. Sanders has clearly and consistently criticized Fidel Castro’s authoritarianism and condemned his human rights abuses, and he’s simply echoing President Obama’s acknowledgment that Cuba made progress, especially in education,” said Mike Casca, Sanders’ communications director.
As Florida’s March 17 Democratic primary approaches, the race has narrowed down to a two-person contest between Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden. According to a recent poll, Biden holds a commanding 50-point lead in the Sunshine State, which offers the secondlargest delegate haul left on the primary calendar.
POLITICAL PRISONER
Like Rodriguez, Carlos Calzadilla-Palacio’s grandfather was a political prisoner in the 1960s in Cuba, where he spent three months in jail as a teenager for distributing fliers critical of the Castro government.
Now a senior at John Jay College in New York, Calzadilla-Palacio grew up in Miami with his parents, both of whom left Cuba in the early 1990s. As a Sanders supporter, Calzadilla-Palacio takes issue with the scathing response the senator’s remarks have received, a position he fleshed out in a recent opinion piece on the digital site Latino Rebels.
“It seems most of the people talking about this issue in the media are not Cuban-American and most of these politicians are not Cuban-American. They just don’t have a personal connection to it. We’re being spoken for,” he said.
Calzadilla-Palacio said that invoking the plight of political prisoners and the authoritarian overreaches of the Castro government to criticize Sanders felt “really hurtful ... and just so disingenuous.”
“It felt like people were using the suffering of my grandfather, using the Cuban-American community for their own political agenda.” Knowing about his grandfather’s experience, Calzadilla-Palacio says he would never support a candidate who would undermine the democratic process, and notes that Sanders has condemned authoritarianism “over and over” again.
“That’s my commitment to democracy, hearing my grandfather’s stories, and learning from them how important it is to protect political and civil rights. That’s why it hurts when people use that pain for political purposes.”
He added: “We have to understand and realize that Bernie is not Castro and that it is ridiculous to even make that comparison.”
CUBAN-AMERICAN FAMILY CONVERSATION
When 21-year-old Gabriel Hernandez, a student at Mississippi State University, heard Sanders’ “60 Minutes” interview, he knew the senator’s comments were guaranteed to rub his Cuban-American relatives the wrong way.
“My first thought was: ‘What craziness is this going to cause within my family?’”
“To give you an idea, I recently had some of my Cuban family come visit me and one of the first things that got brought up” was the 2020 election, he said. “They assumed I would be voting for Donald Trump because of our family, because of our heritage and everything. And I was honest with them about my support of Bernie Sanders and that didn’t go over well. It basically translated as a slap in the face.”
For Hernandez, the hubbub over the Cuba comments — and the subsequent parallels critics drew between Sanders’ and Castro’s political ideologies — was an opportunity to start a nuanced conversation about a word deeply reviled in his family: socialism.
“I’ve been told about socialism since I was a child, but no real conversation about it ever happened. So I was glad this was finally being brought up in public,” he said. “Before, it was like the elephant in the room.”
At issue is an automatic association between socialism and authoritarianism.
“It’s almost like I’ve had to step around the word. I used to think that if I just made the distinctions really clear between socialism and democratic socialism and communism, they would be more open to it,” Hernandez said. “But they still equate socialism with a totalitarian, authoritarian regime. And it’s hard to get them to talk about it.”
Calzadilla-Palacio knows first-hand how difficult it is to bridge generational differences within CubanAmerican families, especially when older relatives’ political viewpoints, as both he and Hernandez are quick to acknowledge, come from a place of pain.
“I mean you can ask any young Cuban American who grew up in Florida, the issue with Castro and Cuba is something that is obviously inescapable. You bring up any social reform or any idea and the reaction is ‘Oh, that’s communism, that’s communism,’” he said. “As young Cuban Americans, we understand that when someone like Bernie talks about democratic socialism, he is talking about a social democracy with a strong welfare state. It’s not spooky Castro communism. ... And I think that our perspective is shared among a lot of people but we are not being heard.”
As concerns escalate about Sanders’ ability to win over Hispanic voters, including Cuban Americans, across the state of Florida, Calzadilla-Palacio maintains there’s underrated political diversity in his community.
“I think it’s very important to acknowledge that Cuban Americans are not monolithic. Many of us have our own political views and they are not just shaped by this red scare, by this cold war mentality,” he said.
Like Hernandez, Calzadilla-Palacio believes the extensive coverage of Sanders’ recent Cuba comments could help pave the way for more nuanced political discussion.
“We’ll see. This is already starting to change the conversation a bit and I think hopefully it can impact the discourse as much as possible,” he said “A lot of young people in the Cuban-American community fear speaking out in this way for fear of being labeled a comunista and we can’t be afraid of that anymore. We need to stand up for what we believe in.”
According to Vila, the FIU student, there’s another topic missing from the conversation: a reckoning with the racial and class divides within the CubanAmerican electorate.
“It’s not just a generational divide. Many of the Cubans who are here say that the Cubans who are coming now are not the same as them. Basically, what I think they are trying to say is that the Cubans who are coming here now are a lot more brown and a lot more poor,” Vila said. “The Cuban diaspora is completely different and is continuing to change every single year.”
For Rodriguez, the 78year-old former political prisoner, there’s a similar quality to his past opposition to Castro and his current support for Sanders.
“I was an anti-castrista fighter. I swam against the current then because the socialists had a stronghold on the Cuban population. Now I’m swimming against the current again with Sanders,” he said. “That’s the way it is, my friend.”
Lautaro Grinspan: @laugrinspan