It was a typical Thanksgiving dinner conversation at my grandparents’ house in Quakertown.
“Fidel Castro is a communist!” my Republican grandfather was shouting, waving about a ham-laden fork for dramatic effect. “The Cuban people are starving. They’re oppressed!”
My grandmother implored him to stop discussing politics at the table, the Pennsylvania Dutch intonations of her voice soft as the shoofly pie molasses we would soon devour. Still a young child, I silently stared down at my stuffing, the shape of which suddenly resembled the silhouette of Fidel.
Like so many Americans, I grew up with serious Castro-confusion. In college, for the first time, I heard praise for Cuba’s renowned system of universal health care. I learned that its infant mortality rate is strikingly lower than that of the U.S. and read with interest about Cuba’s highly successful literacy and rural education program.
But just as I was concluding that my Grandpa was dead wrong about Castro, a classmate of mine, whose family hails from Cuba, told me about Castro’s horrifying torture camps for gays, lesbians and people with non-normative gender identities. I read about the lack of a free press in Cuba and Fidel’s acute harassment of political dissidents. How could a good person do so much evil?
Experiencing such whiplash about “the meaning of Castro” is as American as arguing about politics over Thanksgiving dinner. Fidel, our very own boogeyman, is synonymous with socialism itself in the eyes and ears of much of the U.S. public. This is precisely what puts self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in an almost impossible position when publicly questioned about his views on Castro’s Cuba.
“Is that a bad thing?” Sanders rhetorically asked about Cuba’s literacy program in a recent interview, only after he purposefully decried all dictatorships. “Even though Castro did it?”
Sanders’s acknowledgement of both the evil and the good of Castro’s legacy was quickly deemed “unacceptable” by critics, some of whom suggest that to praise the positive, egalitarian aspects of Castro’s legacy is to apologize for the disgusting human rights violations he also authorized.
Perhaps Sanders ought to have used stronger language in his condemnation of Castro. What Sanders’s critics seem to forget is Sanders is speaking and campaigning in the U.S.: a sociopolitical context in which any criticism of Castro’s authoritarianism will inevitably be “heard” as a flaw of socialism per se, rather than an acknowledgement of a problematic instance of its application. This puts Sanders in a trap, and it’s one that his opponents are eager to exploit.
While Sanders does have a history of making some positive statements about some aspects of Cuba’s socialist history, when campaigning he overwhelmingly prefers to reference countries such as Norway, Sweden and Canada in support of the more robust social welfare state he advocates. His catch phrase in these instances is “every major country on Earth,” and, perhaps problematically, this expression clearly excludes Cuba, Venezuela and other socialist regimes of the Global South.
However, when challenging Sanders’s positions, his critics ignore his preferred examples and instead conjure up Fidel. While raising critical and probing questions about Castro’s legacy is certainly legitimate, Fidel has become a trope employed to distract us from serious attempts to discuss the merits of ideas such as universal health care.
President Obama also celebrated elements of Cuba’s socialist programs but was not condemned for it. Since Obama does not self-identify as a socialist, there was no need to invoke the boogeyman, for socialism itself wasn’t being proposed by the former president.
Given the interconnectedness of Castro and the very idea of socialism in the United States, Sanders is compelled to tease out positive, egalitarian elements of Castro’s highly complicated legacy in his public defense of democratic socialism. He doesn’t want to go there, we make him go there, and he’s caught in a double bind.
If he simply condemns Castro’s authoritarianism, the American public will throw up its hands and exclaim, as my grandfather often did, that “socialism doesn’t work.” Alternatively, if he points to “good things” that Castro accomplished under the rubric of socialism — even while condemning Castro’s authoritarianism — his comments will be denounced as unacceptable.
Thanksgiving arguments about socialism are part of the fabric America, but in our public, political discourse, it is incumbent on us to elevate the discussion. The truth is, no one seriously thinks Sanders is proposing Castro-style socialism.
We must continue to cast light on all human rights abuses committed by both capitalist and socialist regimes. But we should do so in a way that allows for serious discussion of what Sanders is truly fighting for, such as “Medicare for All,” a Green New Deal and a demilitarized southern border.
Amy Reed-Sandoval, who was born and raised in Allentown, is an assistant professor with University of Nevada’s Department of Philosophy.
