Joe Scarborough mocks Sanders' defense of Castro: 'Like saying Mussolini had the trains running'

close

Video

Joe Scarborough blasts Bernie Sanders for defending Fidel Castro

MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' host Joe Scarborough takes Bernie Sanders to task for his comments defending Fidel Castro.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough blasted Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Tuesday, likening his defense of the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to praise for Italy's Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

His comments came after Sanders appeared to defend Castro for his support of a "literacy brigade" on CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday.

"They helped people to read and write," Sanders told interviewer Anderson Cooper. "You know what, I think teaching people to read and write is a good thing."

"That's like saying Mussolini had the trains running," said Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida. “You cannot talk about Fidel Castro’s literacy programs, you just can’t -- not in American politics -- and shouldn’t be able to without talking about the long laundry list of evils committed by Fidel Castro against his own people over decades."

BERNIE SANDERS SEEN IN UNEARTHED 1986 VIDEO RECALLING EXCITEMENT OVER CASTRO'S REVOLUTION IN CUBA

Earlier in the program, Scarborough acknowledged that Castro "had a literacy regime, but he also had a regime who tortured Catholics, tortured people who worshipped God in a way he didn’t like, tortured students that had newspapers, kept people locked up for years, killed people.”

Scarborough then predicted that the comments meant that "Bernie Sanders will get wiped out in South Florida, which means he will never -- like I'm talking about in the general election -- I don't know how he'll do in the primary there. Kiss Florida goodbye."

BERNIE SANDERS' DEFENSE OF CASTRO'S CUBA EVOKES SOCIALISM'S BRUTAL HISTORY

In remarks at the University of Vermont in 1986, Sanders -- then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont's largest city -- recalled "being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"I was a kid ... and it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people."

During that speech, Sanders said he almost had to "puke" when he saw John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon "talking about which particular method they should use about destroying the revolution" during a 1960 election debate.

"For the first time in my adult life, what I was seeing is the Democrats and Republicans ... clearly that there really wasn't a whole lot of difference between the two," he said.