In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders said, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”

Sanders owes much of his support to people from my generation. I want to caution my peers to be careful what you wish for. If Sanders gets his way, his supporters are in for a rude awakening. After my nine days in Cuba, I can tell you that the literacy rate is the least of the country’s problems. What's more, it was Castro and his totalitarian regime that created most of those problems.

I traveled to Cuba as part of a school trip in June 2016. It was a historic trip, considering that we were one of the first seventh-grade classes to travel to Cuba after the travel ban was lifted.

I am not writing this to tear down the Cuban people or their country. They all treated us graciously, the countryside was beautiful, and the culture was fascinating. I am extremely grateful to have had that unique opportunity. However, I want to share my experience to shed light on some of the grievous shortcomings of socialism given its surge in this year's Democratic primary.

“What being a socialist means is a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary,” Sanders said in 1988. “Where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semislaves to other people who can hire and fire.”

I am sad to report that what I witnessed was radically different from Sanders’s “vision.” Socialism has not produced an economic nirvana in Cuba — or anything like it. As soon as I walked off the plane, I was struck by the island heat, the lack of both air conditioning and a place to buy a bottle of water in the airport. There seemed to be small stands for buying food, yet none of them was open even though it was the middle of the day. The terminal was like a ghost town.

The one customs agent could not understand what we were doing there. After some explaining and pleading in Spanish, my teacher finally convinced her to let us through. They took a picture of each of us (the first Orwellian moment), which felt like a real violation of privacy.

For a time, I remember my naive seventh-grade self thinking I was in this cool time warp. Everything was stuck in the 50s, from the cars to the failing infrastructure. Looking back, this saddens me. These kind Cuban people are stuck in the past with no escape due to socialist economic policies.

Sanders seems to think that socialism will improve humanity's lot, yet the hotels and housing I experienced refute this sentiment. Our toilets did not flush. The bedding was decrepit, and it probably gave me my going-away present from the socialist paradise — a head full of lice. This in a country where tourism is a large industry.

I went into this trip knowing that we would see just what the government wanted us to see. Yet it was still easy to notice the failing infrastructure throughout the country. Even in the parts of Havana they allowed us to see, the buildings had not been updated since the 50s. The same goes for nearly all the cars I saw. Things only got worse as we headed into the countryside. Even when we came upon a paved road, it would be extremely narrow and filled with giant potholes. We noticed that the locals' modes of transportation shifted from old cars in the city to horse-drawn carts in the country. Our tour guide made a point of telling us about the newly installed streetlights in Havana. It astonished me how few streetlights the country had and that even the lights they had were a novelty.

While we were able to sample some delicious Cuban food, the majority of what we were offered consisted of rice and beans. There was very little variety to our diet. The rest stops, of which there were few, really only offered beverages — and in limited quantities. How would those young socialists back home live without their beloved Starbucks, grass-fed meat, organic produce, and vegan options? How would they get to their Sanders rallies without cars or iPhones to coordinate rides?

I left Cuba feeling both great respect and great sadness for the Cuban people. Every person I saw is likely still there, languishing in poverty and lacking political freedoms. Unlike any of them, I knew the entire time that I could just hop on a plane and go home to America, where my future could be whatever I wanted it to be. Our great nation and its democratic government would place no ceiling on my potential. The Cubans around me were not so lucky. They were living as if their country had been set back by a nuclear strike, and things weren't about to get better.

What terrifies me about the growing wave of “Bernie Bros” among my peers is that none of them has learned the lessons of history. They have not seen what socialism can do to a once thriving people. I fear that they do not understand the destructive power of socialism, of which Cuba is a prime example.

Norah Nappi is a high school junior in Bethesda, Maryland.