Wild about 'Cuban revolution'? He can 'kiss Florida goodbye'

FPI / February 24, 2020

Florida will not be in play for Democrats if Bernie Sanders does indeed go on to win the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, an activist said.

Sanders has several times in the past delivered comments praising Cuban socialist dictator Fidel Castro. Nearly 70 percent of all Cuban Americans live in Florida. Most have either fled socialism or have family that did.

Voto Latino CEO María Teresa Kumar said Democrats could “kiss Florida goodbye” if Sanders is the Dems’ nominee.

Appearing Sunday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy”, Kumar said: “I say that Floridians — Latinos that have fled socialism, they have fled and they are in Florida, and they have sensibilities that are different from the rest of the Latino community.”

Kumar added, “You pare that down with a lot of the more conservative folks that are Democrats in Florida, and I don’t see a pathway for him there. That’s just the beginning. I can tell you right now Donald Trump has been targeting folks on my staff since March of last year with an anti-democratic socialist message in Spanglish, English, and Spanish. They are not leaving anybody behind. People don’t realize there’s a socialization happening on the Trump campaign that’s been very effective. Then you understand the population of someone like a Floridian voter, and you know vying for Florida. He’s going to figure out if I don’t have Florida — I’m almost 125,000 percent confident he wouldn’t get it — where is the pathway?”

In a 1989 statement as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders praised the Cuban revolution as a “very profound and very deep revolution,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“For better or for worse, the Cuban revolution is a very profound and very deep revolution,” Sanders wrote. “Much deeper than I had understood. More interesting than their providing their people with free health care, free education, free housing … is that they are in fact creating a very different value system than the one we are familiar with.”

Last February, the Reagan Battalion Twitter account posted a video of Sanders from 1986 in which he reminisces about watching the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960 and almost leaving “to puke” when both candidates criticized Castro.

“But I remember, for some reason, being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba,” he said. “I was a kid and I remember reading that.”

Sanders took his wife to the Soviet Union in 1988. Although the trip occurred right after their marriage, Sanders claimed that it was to establish a “sister city” program with Yaroslavl while he was serving as mayor of Burlington.

“The fact is that I went to establish a sister city program with Yaroslavl, then in the Soviet Union, now an important city in Russia which is still in existence today,” Sanders told “MSNBC Live” in 2015. “The purpose of that trip was a sister city. Did it take place after my marriage? It did.”

The Guardian reported that the trip “doubled as a honeymoon with his new wife, Jane.”

“There are some things that [the Soviet Union does] better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive,” Sanders said after his trip to the Soviet Union, according to the Washington Examiner.

Free Press International