Earlier this week, after he’d become the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders slipped and fell face-first on a series of comments he’d made when he was decades younger—and which, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to defend on his march to taking on Donald Trump for the presidency. Having previously offered qualified defenses of Fidel Castro’s brutal, decades-long regime in Cuba, Sanders told CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday that Castro’s “literacy program” was praiseworthy. “It’s unfair to simply say everything [under Castro] is bad,” Sanders added, noting that “the truth is the truth.”

In fairness to Sanders, there is some truth to the truth. Literacy rates under Castro skyrocketed, as they did across many of the vicious Communist regimes in places like Albania or the Soviet Union. That truth, however, elides an important fact: A litany of other governments have overseen substantial improvements in literacy or health care outcomes without simultaneously suffering through decades of dictatorship, disappearances, and disastrous economic reforms that have immiserated an entire island.

Castro’s accomplishments—a common talking point among the leftist milieu the Vermont senator emerged from in the late Cold War period—came alongside a raft of barbaric policies that, at least in the Americas, were without compare. Castro, for instance, “imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands more of his own people than any other Latin American dictator,” as one Yale history professor recounted after the Cuban tyrant’s 2016 death. That makes a certain, facile sense: Castro was the longest-ruling dictator the twentieth century saw, after all.

But that lone figure hardly captures the depravity Castro’s regime brought to bear in Cuba. As one analysis in Foreign Policy noted, Cuba collapsed under Castro’s regime into one of the poorest countries in the Americas, crumbling into an economic basket case despite tens of billions of dollars in subsidies from the Soviet Union. The economic implosion came amid Castro’s edicts that Cubans could no longer join any independent unions or go on strike—all as Castro continued imprisoning political prisoners by the tens of thousands, including placing LGBTQ Cubans in what Amherst political science professor Javier Corrales described as “concentration camps.”

None of these policies had a direct impact on the literacy rates Sanders has praised. But what’s a remarkable literacy rate worth when the only things on hand to read are state-sponsored paeans to Castro’s enduring despotism? Not only was everything from libraries to mass media neutered and censored under Castro, but when he formally stepped down in 2008, Castro’s Cuba was the only country besides China that had more than 20 journalists jailed for the crime of plying their trade. The post-Castro regime has only continued this legacy: In Reporters Without Borders’ most recent Press Freedom Index, Cuba ranks dead last among all nations in the Americas—good for 169th out of 180 total countries worldwide; coming in behind fellow dictatorships like Azerbaijan and Equatorial Guinea.