A Firsthand Look at Socialism
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Summary
Sen. Ted Cruz is joined by his aunt, Tia Sonia, who fled Fidel Castro's communist regime in Cuba in the late 1950s. She tells us about her life in Cuba, her escape from the Castro regime, and her new life in the United States.
Transcript
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but by someone who fled another socialist revolution,
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We are joined as ever by the senator and also by the senator's Tia Sonia.
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My Spanish is not very good, but I think that was about right.
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This is, in a few days, going to be the 58th anniversary
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And yet we've got the leader of the Democratic Party nomination process
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Very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba.
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But, you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad.
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You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?
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Listen, Bernie has spent his entire life, his entire career,
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But this week, his latest ode to Fidel Castro, frankly, just pissed me off.
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This guy is the front runner for the Democratic nomination to be president.
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And he sings the praises of Castro and Cuban communism.
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First of all, tell me what it was like to be in Cuba
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when the revolution happened, when Castro took over.
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A lot of people were happy because finally somebody was coming in that was praising,
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we're going to give you a chance to change your hope.
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Everybody was going to have whatever they want to.
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The rich continue to have money, and everybody will be the same.
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In reality, yes, everybody went the same, but everybody was poor.
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There was no difference between the poor and the rich.
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He trained the people to even be against the family.
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By telling them, we're going to give you this and that and the other.
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But you got to tell us what's going on in your house.
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So everything was persecuting one another, especially the older people.
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That actually, we lived a good life before in Cuba.
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What do people face in terms of their friends and neighbors and families spying on them from the government?
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There is somebody that is responsible to keep an eye on you, in your house.
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And they tell you, you keep an eye on every neighbor of this block.
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If you bring anything, maybe I'm going from the United States to Cuba and there's somebody coming in.
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So we need to wash their house in case they go out and sell in the black market or they do something with what you brought in.
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So there's somebody who's always keeping an eye on you and try to report you.
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A good thing that happened to me, something that happened to me that is very interesting.
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One of the trips that I went back to Cuba, I wanted to take the kids, some of the kids from there, to go fishing.
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So I'm coming in to take my family on a boat ride.
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By the way, Michael, if you go there, you can rent a boat as an American.
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She can't rent a boat because she's Cuban, even though she's an American citizen now.
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There was a boat in the river that my niece wanted to go in.
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And when we get in to ride the boat with the rest of the people, they said, you all cannot get in.
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And I said, but we're paying with the same money that they're paying.
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Because they know if they were allowed to leave, they'd all leave.
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Sonia, how quickly after, as you say, you know, people liked Castro initially.
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He immediately started saying the policies that he wanted to do.
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He was going to take things away from the rich.
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He was going to take things away from the people to give to others.
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He was to actually take money from you and give it to the poor.
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She was really, was proud of what she was doing.
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My mother itself was told that she had to teach at the school a different kind of curriculum.
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She was told she needed to teach about the revolution, Castro, the regime, the things that needed to happen.
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My mother had to actually pretend that she was losing her mind, and she was dismissed immediately.
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I mean, I would sit with my cousin, Bebe, who's Sonia's daughter.
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The two of us would sit literally on the floor in the living room and listen to my dad and my tia Sonia tell us stories about the revolution, and my abuelo and abuela, their parents were there also.
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So my grandmother, my abuela, she's a sixth grade teacher.
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Castro takes over, and she's ordered, you must teach communism to the kids.
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And my grandmother said she wasn't going to do it.
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My tia Sonia mentioned something just very mild.
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In the classroom, she began literally foaming at the mouth and pretending she was insane.
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But in the communist dictatorship, she wasn't allowed to quit.
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And she made the decision she would rather have the stigma, have the shame of people thinking she was a crazy person than be a part of indoctrinating these kids.
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And it was very painful because my mother was a great teacher.
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But she had to play crazy in order to get out of that situation.
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But what I want to know is how, in Cuba, the public opinion changes very quickly.
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People see what a monster Castro is, and they start to hate his guts.
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How is it that in the United States, now, so many years on, 58 years on now since you left,
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you have a presidential candidate, you've got a U.S. senator who's still singing the praises of this guy.
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He only, if you go there as a Cuban, you go and see somebody, a relative.
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You're going to see the misery that they live in.
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They don't know what to put on the table to serve their kids.
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They don't know how to get, they're going to get the food that they're going to eat tomorrow.
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If you're going as somebody from another country or as a tourist, you're taking to,
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you actually become prisoner of the government.
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In 1989, Sanders stated after visiting Cuba, quote,
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Bernie said the Cuban people, quote, had an almost religious affection for Castro.
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He is playing on the mind of the younger generation here.
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He was either himself complicit in the lie or he was naive enough or ideological enough
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to let the Castro regime lie to him and say, look at this, this paradise.
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They didn't take him to where the Cuban people were.
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Cuban people don't have any money to buy anything.
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So let me take you back, Thea, back to 59, back to 60.
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What happened when you started fighting against Castro?
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So you were pretty clearly fighting against the regime.
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So what, like when they picked you up, what happened?
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Well, they put you in a room and there was people sitting on the floor and everybody's,
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you know, that's where you were with a whole bunch of people in the floor.
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My friends, friends that I have, could not even come and find out with my parents where
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They were afraid because everybody was persecuted.
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So it was very difficult to leave on the Castro regime.
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What if, so when you come back, you usually bring a duffel bag with medicine, medicine,
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Because nobody has underwear there because there's so much poverty.
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You'll wear like sweatpants, a t-shirt, and flip-flop.
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That's what she wears on the plane coming back.
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A lot of people don't understand what is the difference between socialism and communism.
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Socialism is simply the economic system of communism.
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Socialism is government ownership of the means of production or distribution.
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Cuba in the 1950s was the world's number one producer of sugar.
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My father, to this day, doesn't have his front teeth because Batista's police kicked
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I mean, we're told by a lot of people in the United States, a lot of left-wingers, they
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say Cuba has some of the best health care in the world and everybody's covered.
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I can personally tell you that I went to the doctor there because I have mosquito bites
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that it got into infection and they put a shot on me in front of 60 other people that were
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Doctors come to your house in a bicycle and they're hungry.
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When they get there, they come to the house to see.
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Matter of fact, I was in a house visiting and they were trying to see the little girl.
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He came in a bicycle and I bought some things that there was somebody in the street selling
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Probably the most visible sign that Cuba hasn't changed or hasn't progressed is they have those
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And, you know, people like to think that that's sort of quaint and cute that they have cars
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The reason they have cars from the 1950s is they can't get anything else.
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You know, the scary thing about all of this is you've got the experience of it, 58 years
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There are various studies that have come out that show that even the majority of young Americans,
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millennials and Gen Z now embrace socialism and prefer it to capitalism.
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Now, the bright side, I will say the silver lining is that a much smaller percentage can actually
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But beyond just ignorance, beyond just not knowing what it is, what is drawing young
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It's the work that they have given out, the change.
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You know, all of this ambition and giving it to me, there's nothing given to you.
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You need to work and try to achieve your dream by hard work and by doing what you want to
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I mean, I've noticed this with your colleague, Senator Sanders.
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You know, I mean, he's been talking about this for 50 years and no one listened.
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But now only, you know, now that he's in his mid-70s, it's catching on.
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And I even think of this absent Bernie Sanders.
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People knew that communism, socialism were terrible for so long.
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Well, and too often they're not taught in schools what happened.
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You know, how many Bernie supporters know that the Soviet Union killed 20 million people
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And so when Bernie defends it, it seems, look, and I have to admit, I remember in college,
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a guy who lived down the hall from me had a poster on the wall of Che Guevara.
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And I went in, I said, hey, that's really cool.
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That's all, you know, Che Guevara was a guerrilla, fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba.
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Have you thought of maybe putting a poster of Hitler next to you?
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Like if you're going to celebrate people that torture and murder, actually, Che was an amateur.
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And he was, you know, it, these villains have been glamorized.
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You know, we've talked a lot about the political and the economic side of things,
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how the government takes all your stuff and then they take power away from you.
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I notice, Sonia, you have a cross that you're wearing, obviously, Senator Cruz.
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One of the big aspects of communism, as it's always been practiced, is the atheism of it all.
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And I wonder if there's a relation here that as religiosity in America has declined,
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as young people are raised more or less without a religion,
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if maybe that's playing some role in why communism is catching on.
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You know, one of the great men of the 20th century to defeat communism was the Pope,
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Well, and Pope John Paul II played a profound role of going to Poland and promising that Poland
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And it was truly, I think, divine providence that you had the Pope and Reagan and Margaret
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And I think those three people, more than any human beings on earth,
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defeated the Soviet Union and won the Cold War.
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Mind you, Bernie was rooting for the Soviet Union during all of this.
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Okay, that's where, like, normal people, you go to the beach, you go to,
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Heidi and I went to St. Thomas, it was beautiful.
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Says, sweetheart, I love you so much, let's do a honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
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There's only one person I know on the national stage that honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
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You know, the Soviet Union killed over 20 million people.
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If Bernie was a professor at some liberal arts college out in the frozen tundra,
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This is someone who wants to be president of the United States,
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and he kisses up to and apologizes for totalitarian dictators.
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Like, when have you ever heard him speak as positively about Abraham Lincoln
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as he does about Castro and Ortega and Mao and Stalin?
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If you look at these communist regimes, they persecute faith.
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The beauty of the First Amendment is it gives everyone the right to choose
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You know, Bernie, when he praised China in the debate this week,
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somehow, when Bernie talked about its great poverty eradication,
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you don't have to go back to Mao to find the torture and murder.
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Right now, today, there are one million Uyghurs,
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one million in concentration camps in China today.
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How, why is Bernie and why are leftists so willing to praise and be proud of regimes that are torturing and murdering people?
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Do you think this is part of why they make their appeal successfully, though?
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Because the thing I notice so much about the socialists in America today
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is they're all making these very moral arguments.
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It's about giving people their right to health care and their right to have a lot of money.
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In the schools, you would have Cuban soldiers come in.
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And they'd tell the children, they'd say, close your eyes and pray to Jesus for a piece of candy.
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And the kids would all do it and they'd open their eyes and there'd be no candy.
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And then the soldiers would say, close your eyes and pray to Fidel Castro for a piece of candy.
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And the kids would close their eyes and the soldiers would put candy on their desks.
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And they'd open their eyes and there was candy.
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This is the literacy program Bernie Sanders is praising.
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This is the indoctrination that my abuela refused to participate in.
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They are actually indoctrinating the people since they were tiny little kids.
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They're going to make the same money that you're making, that he's making.
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I mean, does the indoctrination end up persuading people?
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Actually, they thought that it was going to be reality.
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They really blinded them to believe what they were saying.
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But they immediately took the blind off and saying, everybody's in the same boat.
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I mean, there's a reason people every day risk their lives to flee Cuba.
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You know, Reagan, in the height of the Cold War, he had a great way of putting it.
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He said, the thing liberals never seem to notice is on the Berlin Wall, the machine
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That you didn't get anyone from East Germany saying, or from West Germany saying, I got
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The way I like to put it as a Cuban American is the thing liberals never notice is in Cuba,
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I'd like to see Bernie Sanders go hop on a raft in Key West.
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You can't get, you can't actually see a doctor.
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Well, actually, you know, tying in all of these points on the economic, on the political
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and on the religious, communism has been called the God that failed, right?
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It was a sort of substitute religion, a substitute God, and it failed.
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I mean, what was the biggest despair, the biggest regret when, when you saw something
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Well, the, the, the, the biggest, it was seeing the people suffering for not being able
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The basic things that no, don't being able to work because why do you want to work when
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You know, that money disappeared from you immediately.
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And you all know the numbers, but you know, an average person make $30 a month.
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You, you, you see the kids, they drink water with sugar to get their stomach full.
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It's so interesting that you say that because it's, communism starts out as this idealistic
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fantasy, very highfalutin, very high-minded literacy programs, all that.
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And then the reality of the failure is people can't even fill their stomachs.
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Although, you know, there is one exception, which is the communist party rulers.
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And by the way, Putin lives like a billionaire, Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him, they lived
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Communism, when you have all the power at the top and, and, and, and what does Bernie suggest
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it would be any different if the government is in charge of everything, every place that
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has happened, the rulers live like kings and everyone else's is miserable.
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Well, we, we did actually get one mailbag question that I think is very much on this topic, which
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is with the democratic party veering so far to the left and embracing these absolutely
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disgusting positions, hopefully we'll turn off most of the American people.
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Should conservatives be happy that the God that failed is about to fail the democratic party?
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But listen, what is truly terrifying is I think the American people could elect a wild eyed
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If a hundred thousand votes had flipped in 2016, Hillary Clinton would be the president
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And Bernie, the media treats him kind of like your crazy uncle.
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He's praising, murdering, torturing communist dictators.
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And, and, and I got to admit, I am, it's all fine and good to celebrate unless he ends
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And God help the direction this country goes if that happens.
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Well, because you already fled one communist hellhole and this was the great hope is America
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You, the listener, we've already used up more than our time and we've taken up too much
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of your time to you, Sonia, but thank you so much for being here.
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And we've got a lot more coming up on the show anyway.
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This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security
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