This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 5th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One Democratic presidential frontrunner, Bernie Sanders, has said nice things about Cuba's

literacy programs.

While it's impossible to imagine that Sanders isn't aware of how that regime treats people,

it's important to understand this from Cato's Ian Vasquez, to what uses can people put their

literacy if their decisions are severely restricted by an authoritarian regime?

Well first of all it is astounding to hear a leading U.S. presidential candidate praise the so-called

accomplishments of a totalitarian regime.

It is equally astounding to hear Sanders talk about Cuba in a way that parrots the regime's

propaganda because the record at the very least does not support the misleading

claims of Castro's apologists and the data that comes out of Cuba is dubious and there's a lot of

indication that it's manipulated.

So in terms of literacy rates, Cuba does have a high literacy rate,

but remember before the revolution Cuba was one of the

countries in Latin America that had among the highest literacy rates 80 percent.

It was one of the most prosperous countries so it also had among the best

indicators of among the best health indicators and other indicators of

well-being. Some of these, according to Cuban official data, have improved, but the fact of the matter

is that these indicators, like literacy, improved in all of Latin America.

In Chile and Costa Rica, literacy rates improved to the point that they're similar to Cuba's today and other countries like Peru and Brazil

improved by even more impressive gains. What this means is that you don't have to impose a repressive police

...