The passing of Fidel Castro is a keen reminder that many liberties so often taken for granted in the West, even as they are rapidly diminishing in the face of radical secularism, are still not a given for many.

For over 55 years, the Castro regime perpetrated numerous human rights abuses. Basic civil liberties and freedom of the press were non-existent. Political opponents were detained, tortured or killed without cause.

Liberalization of the nation’s abortion law quickly led the modestly sized island nation to become a country with one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

In the days following the revolution, Castro’s opponents were systematically rounded-up, put on trial in kangaroo courts and lined-up before firing squads.

Castro’s own Agrarian Reform Chief promised that the regime “will erect the most formidable execution wall in the history of humanity.” Private property was nationalized and seized from both corporations and private individuals. Many Cubans lost everything.

Yet through all of the murdering and government take over of citizens lives, Bernie Sanders stood strong in support of Fidel Castro and his murderous regime.

In the following video from 1986 you will see how the idea of opposing the Castro regime actually made him feel.

Watch the video:

“But I remember, for some reason, being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba. I was a kid and I remember reading that. And it was just, it seemed right and appropriate the poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people.

And I remember, again, very distinctly, a very distinct feeling. I was watching the debate, you remember the famous Nixon-Kennedy debate, that was the first time that presidential candidates actually debated. And I was becoming increasingly interested in politics, didn’t know much, but was interested.

I remember sitting in the student lounge in a dormitory watching the debate, and at that time — well, I can’t talk about you, but I was very excited and impressed by the Cuban Revolution.

And there was Kennedy and Nixon talking about which particular method they should use about destroying the revolution. Remember, the irony, as we learned the history later on, Kennedy was saying that Nixon was too soft on communism, to pick up a point that Rick was making, in Cuba.

We should deal firmly with Fidel Castro and Nixon was playing the role of hey, you’ve got to be patient. You know, you can’t do these things, you got to negotiate. When of course, what he was upset about is that secretly they were planning the Bay of Pigs invasion right then.

But for security reasons, he couldn’t come out and say we’re already planning the destruction of the Cuban Revolution, don’t worry about it. So he — he was the liberal and Kennedy was playing the conservative.

Actually, when you read novels, people say there’s a sick feeling in your stomach. Usually I’m sufficiently unemotional not to be sick, but I actually got up in the room and almost left to puke.

Because for the first time in my adult life what I was seeing is that Democrats and Republicans, both of them, as of course, as Rick points out, Kennedy was the flashing young liberal and what we were seeing right before our eyes — my eyes way, way back then — and I didn’t know anything about politics, but clearly that there really wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two.” – Sanders said.

Yet, no matter how much Sanders and his supporters praise his ideas, people who have actually experienced living under them have a completely different view,

Over the intervening decades, millions have fled the island, some so desperate as to venture out on the open ocean in tiny boats in the hopes of reaching the Florida Keys or to make a long roundabout trek through Central America.

“I have more here [in the U.S.] in eight days than I ever had in my 42 years in Cuba,” one recently arrived refugee told the New York Times.

Anyone who dared to speak out against the injustices of the regime was arrested and handed-down sentences of ten or twenty years for “crimes” such as “dangerousness” or “pre-criminal activity.”

Political prisoners were left to languish in squalid conditions in tiny, vermin-infested jail cells with almost no ventilation under the oppressively hot and humid Havana sun. Prisoners of conscience were either crammed into overcrowded jails or restricted to solitary confinement for years on end.

Prison conditions in Cuba are so uninhabitable that from 2010-2011 alone, 202 prisoners died in confinement, according to statistics reported by the Cuban Government, a number that the U.N. Committee against Torture has characterized as “high.”

The Castro regime sought to maintain control over even the most minute and private details of people’s lives. The regime set-up an organization called the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees in Defense of the Revolution, or CDR) that was responsible for monitoring people’s personal lives and reporting them to the police for any signs of “counter-revolutionary” activity.

Every block of every city across the country was assigned to a CDR. The CRDs became a crucial state mechanism for rooting out dissidents. Anyone perceived as against the regime or its Marxist ideals were arrested or subjected to picketing and harassment from citizen brigades mobilized by the police.

Other times, however, the regime would resort to quicker and easier options, commissioning extrajudicial killings to permanently silence their critics.