This is bad. This is shades of Jane Fonda bad. Forget the literacy programs. This is Sanders visiting an American hostage in Cuba.
American Alan Gross, a prisoner in Cuba for five years during the Obama administration, is accusing Sen. Bernie Sanders of commending the communist country when he came to visit him behind bars.
Sanders visited Cuba as part of a congressional delegation in 2014, along with Sens. Heidi Heitkamp and Jon Tester.
During the one-hour meeting, Sanders told the prisoner that he didn’t understand why others criticized Cuba, Gross said in an interview with NPR.
“He said, quote: ‘I don’t know what’s so wrong with this country,’ ” Gross recalled.
A reminder, this is what was happening to Gross.
Gross, who now says he opposes Sanders’ campaign for president, was arrested in December 2009 after completing a U.S. Agency for International Development subcontract. He was in Cuba working to expand Internet access to the country’s small Jewish community, beyond the restrictive Internet regulations set by the Castro government.
He spent 1,841 days in detention, during which he lost five teeth and over 100 pounds. He also said his interrogators threatened to pull out his fingernails and to hang him.
“The first year of my captivity was akin to sensory deprivation because I saw about 20 minutes of sunlight during the first year,” Gross said.
Three things.
1. Sanders is reflexively sympathetic to Marxist regimes and so incapable of grasping opposition to them that he was telling a Jewish man being held hostage and threatened with torture, that he doesn’t know what’s wrong with the Marxist regime holding him hostage.
2. Sanders has no care or concern for Jews. This isn’t new, but just reinforces it.
3. Sanders isn’t just an apologist for Castro’s literacy programs, but its prisons.
Bernie Sanders was there on a general Cuban visit with a Democrat delegation. The visit was a sidebar. Here’s Sanders’ press release, in which he touts the visit to Gross, but declines to actually make the case for him.
“We spent an hour with Alan Gross,” Sanders said Monday from his office in Washington. “It was an interesting conversation and certainly we talked to the foreign minister about that.”
Sanders declined to discuss their conversation with Gross nor would he discuss his physical or mental condition after more than four years in prison.
Sanders said Rodriguez was quite familiar with Gross’ case but gave no indication his release was imminent.
“The goal is for us to get him out of there as soon as possible,” he said.
Gross was arrested in 2009 while working as a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development to set up Internet access for Cubans. He is serving a 15-year sentence.
His case has become a roadblock to improving relations between the U.S. and the communist government of Cuba. The Cuban government has indicated it would release Gross in exchange for four Cubans imprisoned in the U.S. on espionage and other charges.
Sanders said that the Cuban demand remains the same.
The U.S. has balked at any such trade but Sanders said the Cubans “think it would be a fair exchange.”
Sanders refused to discuss the condition Gross was in because he was and is an apologist for Marxist regimes. Because he is one.
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