A former American prisoner in Cuba says Bernie Sanders told him he did not see “what’s so wrong with this country” during a 2014 visit to Cuba while the man was still imprisoned.
“He said, quote: ‘I don’t know what’s so wrong with this country,'” Alan Gross, who was arrested in December 2009 and spent five years in Cuban custody, told NPR.
Gross was able to meet with Sanders, Senator Jon Tester (D., Mont.), and former senator Heidi Heitkamp (D., N.D.) in 2014 as part of a congressional delegation pressing for his release.
He said he had a pleasant conversation with Heitkamp and Tester, who brought him a big bag of peanut M&M’s, while Sanders gave him a copy of The Atlantic, but remained mostly quiet for the hour-long meeting.
“Senator Sanders didn’t really engage much in the conversation,” Gross recalled, before Sanders offended him by bringing up his praise of Cuba.
“I just think, you know, it was a stupid thing for him to do,” Gross said. “First, how could he not have seen the incredible deterioration of what was once the grandeur of the pre-Castro era. And two, how could be so insensitive to make that remark to a political hostage — me!”
Gross, who was released in 2014, had brought up the conversation in the past during a podcast with Politico in 2016, but said he was compelled to resurface the story after hearing Sanders defend Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in a February interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes.
“I mean, it’s relevant now. The guy’s running for president of the United States,” Gross stated. “And for him to make those statements demonstrating a basic lack of a grasp on reality is problematic to me. I don’t want to see this guy in the White House.”
Sanders’s Castro comments drew condemnation from Florida Democrats, but the Vermont Senator doubled down afterwards.
“Truth is truth. All right?” Sanders told a CNN town hall, before invoking President Obama as proof that he had legitimate praise during the February Democratic debate.