MIKE GONZALEZ: My family came from Cuba; Sanders should learn about Cuban suffering | Local News

Such comments demonstrate at the very least a lack of sympathy for the victims of the Castro regime.

They're from a piece with something that Sanders said to an audience at the University of Vermont in 1986: I remember, for some reason, being very excited when Fidel Castro revolutionized Cuba . I was a child and I remember reading this, and it seemed right and fitting that the poor should stand up against the rather ugly rich.

It all goes back. Marxists and Marxist sympathizers have always insisted that the end justifies the means, which could explain the contempt for the victims of Castros. But the results of Castros Cuba do not justify the devastation of a culture.

Let's take the comments on ugly and ugly people first. At first glance, you would think that he is talking about people like my parents, who had just left Havana University law school when the revolution triumphed and who suffered a lot later in the 1960s.

But in fact, my two parents were delighted when the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled on New Years Eve in 1958. Like most of their lawyer friends, they enthusiastically supported Castro and his movement.

One of the reasons was that they knew Castro from law school. Although they don't approve of his gangster ways, he promised elections and said he was not a communist (he lied). Besides, no one could be worse than Batista.

Young professionals hated Batista because of his corruption, as did the elites, for an entirely different reason that still eludes Castro's supporters: racism.

Batista was a man of color, blackballed from at least one country club because of his race. Castro, the son of a Spanish soldier who did well in Cuba, was white. Black and Métis Cubans tended to be poorer and were much more likely to support Batista and be part of his police.

Mocking opponents of the Castro regime like the ugly ugly is therefore baseless. It is also in itself ugly. My maternal grandfather was an electrician, an immigrant from Asturias. My grandmother's parents were poor immigrants from Galicia. My grandparents worked to earn a comfortable living and send their daughter to law school. Did they deserve to lose everything?

Did my parents deserve the constant fear of being arrested after the revolution because they refused to embrace communism? All they wanted was freedom of expression and the ability to offer my sister and me a religious education without fear of reprisal. As an altar boy in the 1960s, I can tell you that the practice of Catholicism took courage. I was 8 or 9 years old.

Did my father deserve to die from diabetes at 44 because he couldn't get the diet or the drugs he needed? If he hadn't left university and refused to teach law in 1961, he might still be alive. When he died in hospital, the only equipment that could have saved his life was in use by a Russian diplomat; our father did not have access to it.

And all this human suffering, all these broken eggs, for what kind of omelet? Despite all the much vaunted gains in literacy, Cubans can't read what they want, only what the party says.

Cuba was a fairly advanced country before 1959, which is why Europeans like five of my eight great-grandparents emigrated there.

According to data that anyone who could have easily googled, Cuba in 1959 had the fourth highest literacy rate in Latin America. Of course, these people could read whatever they wanted. My own paternal grandfather was a columnist and anti-Batista lawyer; there are copies of its opposition columns in the library of the University of Miami. (He also regularly criticized Batista on a radio show. Try doing this with Raul Castro today in Havana.)

Cuba also had the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America and the 13th lowest in the world. In terms of food consumption per capita, it ranked third in Latin America. Regarding televisions per capita, it ranks first in Latin America and fifth in the world.

All of this has been crushed by 60 years of communism. No sensible European or American would emigrate to Cuba today. Rather than contempt, the anti-communist Cubans deserve respect.