Fabiola Santiago, an immigrant who fled Cuba in 1969, tore into Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders following his praise for Fidel Castro’s education system.

Santiago, who now works as a columnist for the Miami Herald, grew up in Cuba under Castro’s regime. In a column published Tuesday, Santiago explained her outrage at Sanders, who is the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She described the torment she faced when her family announced that it would be fleeing Cuba for the United States. Santiago was bumped from the top rank in her school after she refused to wear the red scarf mandated by the Communist Party. Those loyal to Castro smeared her family members as “worms” for leaving Cuba.

Santiago claimed these were a few examples of how Castro’s schools forced students to be indoctrinated to support the party or face unthinkable consequences, such as her sympathetic teacher who “disappeared” after speaking out against Castro. She described herself as a child and detailed tricks she was forced to use to skirt the party’s influence.

“As the years pass and the wait for a visa wears on, she learns to work around the Communist indoctrination,” Santiago wrote. “When she’s asked to write a glowing essay on Fidel Castro, she writes biography, complete, thorough, but no glowing appraisal because at 10, she knows more than Bernie Sanders at 78.”

As Santiago noted, Sanders was criticized after old footage showed him defending Castro. Criticism of Sanders grew after he told 60 Minutes this week, “We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba. But, you know, it's unfair to simply say 'everything is bad.' You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing, even though Fidel Castro did it?"

Bernie Sanders defends his 1980s comments about Fidel Castro in an interview on 60 Minutes. https://t.co/ySqvQKoiBU pic.twitter.com/lTwuXWp9sA — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 24, 2020

Santiago addressed this point directly, telling Sanders, “The ‘free education’ in Cuba isn’t free, and the Castro literacy program the American left has bought into is rooted in indoctrination and devotion to the one-party political system. Your apparatchik views on Cuba, senator, are as old and dated as the photos of me and my mother.”

She concluded her column, writing, “You are who you are, a populist riding a wave of discontent, as unfit for the presidency as your rival on the other side of the political spectrum.”

Sanders, while presenting his defense of Castro, acknowledged that he had committed atrocities and killed dissidents, adding, "That's right, and we condemn that.”