When Bernie Sanders ran for president, his opponents did not begin with his tax plan or his health care plan. They began with his past. They reached back to the Cold War, to trips and remarks made decades earlier, and asked voters a simple question: if a man praised socialist governments when those governments were in power, what would he do with power himself? The question followed Sanders through two presidential campaigns, and it has never quite gone away. It matters because it is not only about one politician. It is about how Americans judge a public life and how much weight old sympathies should carry.
The video at the center of this chapter gathers that record in one place. It revisits Sanders’s 1988 trip to the Soviet Union, his praise for the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the comments about Cuba that returned to haunt him during the 2020 Democratic primary. Its argument is direct: these were not stray remarks, but a pattern, and a pattern tells the truth about a politician’s convictions. Sanders’s defenders answer just as directly: he was a mayor on a sister-city visit, a critic of authoritarian rule who also praised literacy and health care programs, and a democratic socialist whose program in America never included one-party rule. This chapter sets out the record and the argument, so readers can judge the pattern for themselves.
A Mayor Abroad in the Cold War
Sanders entered national politics from an unusual place. Born in Brooklyn in 1941, he moved to Vermont and became mayor of Burlington in 1981, winning as an independent socialist in a city long run by Democrats. He governed as a practical mayor, concerned with housing, downtown development, and city services, while speaking openly about democratic socialism. In 1988, during his final year as mayor, he traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a sister-city exchange with Yaroslavl, a city on the Volga northeast of Moscow. The trip was unremarkable in its official purpose: American mayors made such visits throughout the Cold War. What made it memorable was what Sanders said when he came home.
At a press conference after his return, Sanders spoke warmly about aspects of Soviet life that had impressed him, including low-cost housing, health care, and public transportation, and he contrasted them with American problems such as homelessness. His critics heard something else: a mayor who had visited a repressive one-party state and come home with praise rather than condemnation. His supporters heard a mayor describing what he had actually seen. The companion chapter in this book examines that press conference in detail; this chapter widens the frame to ask whether it stood alone.
Nicaragua and the Sandinista Moment
The Soviet trip was not Sanders’s first encounter with a revolutionary government. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had taken power in 1979 after overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship. The Sandinista government, led by Daniel Ortega, was then fighting the Contra rebels, who were backed by the Reagan administration. Sanders, like many on the American left, believed that the Sandinistas had brought literacy, health care, and land reform to a poor country, and that American policy in Central America was defending the interests of the wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. He said so publicly, and his critics have quoted him ever since.
To his defenders, the Nicaragua visit belongs to its time. The Sandinistas had overthrown a brutal dictatorship, and in their early years they did expand schools and clinics. To his critics, that is precisely the point: Sanders praised a government that was already arresting opponents and censoring the press, and he did so while the United States was openly debating whether to support its enemies. The argument over Nicaragua, then, is an argument over judgment. Does sympathy for a revolution’s early promise excuse blindness to its authoritarian turn, or does it reveal a habit of trusting revolutionary governments until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore?
Cuba and the Comments That Returned in 2020
The same question returned, more sharply, in 2020. By then Sanders was no longer a Vermont mayor but a United States senator and a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, having nearly won the nomination in 2016. In interviews during the 2020 campaign, he was asked about Cuba, and he repeated a position he had held for years: that Fidel Castro’s government had carried out a literacy program and improved health care, even as he condemned authoritarianism. His critics seized on the praise. In a primary that included candidates courting Cuban American voters in Florida, his remarks were played again and again as evidence that his sympathies had not changed.
Sanders and his supporters responded that he had condemned Castro’s authoritarian rule in the same interviews, and that praising a literacy program was not the same as praising a dictatorship. They pointed out that other American leaders had acknowledged Cuba’s health care and education achievements while criticizing its lack of freedom. The dispute was therefore not really about whether Cuba had a literacy campaign; it was about emphasis. The video makes the critics’ version of that case, gathering the remarks into a single narrative of admiration for socialist states.
What Old Sympathies Predict, and What They Do Not
Beneath the episodes lies a broader argument about political biography. The critics’ case is that sympathies are predictive: a politician who praised socialist governments abroad and defended them is likely to govern in their spirit at home. On this view, Sanders’s program in America — Medicare for All, free public college, higher taxes on the wealthy, stronger unions — is not the whole story, because a president’s instincts, appointments, and foreign policy would also reflect his older convictions. The pattern, they argue, is the warning.
The counterargument is that governing is constrained by institutions, and Sanders’s American record shows what those constraints produce. As mayor, senator, and presidential candidate, he worked inside American democracy: winning elections, voting in Congress, and proposing legislation that required votes to pass. His program was a program of expanded public services and regulation within a market economy, not state ownership of industry or one-party rule. His supporters argue that the best predictor of how a man governs is how he has actually governed, and that Sanders’s decades in American office show a democratic socialist, not a communist.
Why the Argument Still Matters
A public life is long, times change, and a man can praise a literacy program in one decade and run for president on health care in another without ever intending to import a revolution. Yet a public life is also a single story, and the parts that a candidate would prefer to forget are often the parts his opponents remember best. The 1988 press conference, the Nicaragua trip, and the Cuba remarks are matters of record; what they mean is not. Some readers will see a pattern that settles the matter, and others will see a politician whose American career shows what he actually intended to do with power. In Sanders’s case, the communist misadventures, as his critics call them, still matter because they force a judgment that no platform can settle: not what a politician promises, but what he believes.