Bernie Sanders backs Cuban protests: ‘All people have the right to live in a democratic society’

Vermont senator has previously attracted criticism from the right for his attitude to the Castro government

Bernie Sanders has joined top Democrats and Republicans in voicing his support for Cubans protesting against their government – while also criticising decades of US policy towards the island nation.

The self-described socialist senator tweeted on Monday that “all people have the right to protest and to live in a democratic society,” calling on the government to “respect opposition rights and refrain from violence”.

But he also told the Biden administration: “It’s also long past time to end the unilateral US embargo on Cuba, which has only hurt, not helped, the Cuban people.”

The protests underway in Havana, Santiago and other Cuban cities have sprung up in response to a new spike in Covid-19 cases, the government’s strict authoritarianism, and food and water shortages stemming from a deep economic crisis.

Mr Sanders’s comments come after President Joe Biden spoke up in support of the protesters, declaring that they are “bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights”.

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” he said.

However, the Biden administration has yet to signal a clear break with the Trump administration’s hardline Cuba policy, which effectively reversed the “thaw” overseen by former President Barack Obama. Earlier this year, the US voted against the UN General Assembly’s annual resolution to drop the American embargo on Cuban travel and commerce, as American governments have done for decades – a move that rather flew in the face of Mr Biden’s pre-election promise to try and improve the two countries’ relationship.

Mr Sanders has long been a target of criticism from the political centre and right for past comments praising certain programmes put in place by the decades-long Castro regime, sentiments that came back to haunt him during both his presidential campaigns.

In 2016, a moderator at a TV debate pressed the senator on comments he made in the mid-1980s about both Cuba and Nicaragua, extolling the virtues of their education and healthcare systems. Clarifying his remarks, he said he had for decades opposed the US foreign policy orthodoxy that said “that the United States had the right to do anything that they wanted to do in Latin America”.

On the same debate stage, Hillary Clinton forcefully condemned his remarks. “I think in that same interview he praised what he called the revolution of values in Cuba and talked about how people were working for the common good, not for themselves,” she said. “I just couldn’t disagree more. You know, if the values are that you oppress people, you disappear people, imprison people or even kill people for expressing their opinions, for expressing freedom of speech, that is not the kind of revolution of values that I ever want to see anywhere.”

And in the spring of 2020, Mr Sanders defended his past remarks in a 60 Minutes interview, repeating that it was “unfair” to dismiss Fidel Castro’s efforts on literacy and healthcare despite the authoritarian excesses of the Cuban regime – and emphasising that that does not mean he won’t condemn dictators’ violence and illiberalism when called upon to do so.

The reaction from some in the Cuban-American community – who remain a crucial constituency in Florida, in particular – was scathing. Yuri Pérez, a Cuban political refugee granted asylum in 2009, tore into him in an op-ed for NBC News.

Describing how he was himself “taught to hate different ideas, looks and behaviours”, he explained that “the Cuban educational system is not a ‘literacy programme’, but a tool of indoctrination, designed for the creation of the ‘New Man’ – one who is removed from what we would recognise as Western civilisation’s values, who is intolerant and ready to kill in order to impose the revolutionary ideology.

“Yes, I am ‘feeling the Bern’,” he wrote, “but it is a chilling feeling.”