Even Senator Sanders’ severest critics have readily credited him with being, however politically mistaken, a “man of principle.” His recently voiced claim that it is “unfair” to say that 
“everything is bad” about Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba because El Caballo, as “Fidel” was known to his supporters, seized power with a literacy program ready to introduce on the island should put an end to this “principled” business once and for all. We can now see that, if the Comrade Senator is indeed a man of principle, that principle is an evil one.
In context, it is entirely beside the point that in 1959 Cuba already had a literacy rate of eighty percent, and that neighboring Latin American countries have since made enormous advances in this regard without the aid of a program of imprisonment, torture, exile, and expropriation. Castro’s criminal regime and personal cruelty have been extensively documented, including by Antonio Navarro–a wealthy businessman from an affluent family and former acquaintance who had been at Jesuit school with Castro and initially welcomed his deposition of Fulgencia Batista, but later joined the Resistance and finally fled to Florida after his wife and family–in his superb memoir, Tocayo. Sanders has no interest in any of this, as he had no interest in recognizing the inhumanities of the Soviet regime when he honeymooned in Moscow in 1988 almost two decades after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published in the United States. Sanders is, and has been for decades, an apologist for a regime whose criminality, when measured by the number of lives sacrificed, exceeds that of the Third Reich.
Unlike Unity Mitford, Hitler’s English friend and admirer, Sanders never attempted suicide in remorse for the monsters he supported and defended. “Bernie,” the avuncular “democratic” socialist, in reality is a hard-core Communist revolutionary, well deserving of a present-day McCarthy to hunt him and bring him down. If that isn’t plain to by now to the American public, it deserves to have him for its very own Caballo.
Incidentally, the habit Britons and Americans have adopted of referring to their politicians by their first names is an alarming and dangerous one, suggesting that we regard them as our personal friends and political equals when in fact they are nothing of the sort. They are our masters, always to be suspected and never trusted. (A possible exception is the current President of the United States, who is never referred to as “Donald”–not even anymore “The Donald”– by anyone.) About a decade ago Kenneth Minogue, the late political philosopher, explained that the custom is an ideological, and therefore a malign, one. The practice needs to be jettisoned, beginning at once—with “Bernie.”