Bernie, Meet Fidel. Fidel, Meet Bernie.

Bernard “Bernie” Sanders is one of two Senators from Vermont and one of two people currently running for the Democratic Party nomination for President. This is in case your name is Rip Van Winkle and you have just awoken from a hundred-year sleep. Or was that Sleeping Beauty?He started in politics in college where he led civil rights demonstrations at the University of Chicago. He first began calling himself a “socialist” while serving as Mayor of Burlington. He went on to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1990 and the Senate in 2006, still using the descriptor of a “democratic socialist.” He is only one of two member of the House or the Senate to characterize himself as a socialist. Representative Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin was the only other declared Socialist to serve in the House. He won office initially in 1911 and served on and off until 1929. He is best known for introducing a bill to eliminate the US Senate. How this became part of the Socialist program is not known.Senator Sanders has attracted a remarkable slice of the vote and a very impressive amount of money, most of it in small donations, during his campaign. As of March 29th, he has won primary elections in 14 states and raised 142 million dollars, compared to Hilary Clinton, his rival for the nomination, whose current numbers are 17 and 220 million. He appeals to a wave of younger voters and a fair number of voters fearful of economic dislocation as a result of trade agreements.

Some have suggested that younger voters don’t have any real idea of what socialism is, or how it works as a system to organize a country’s economy. It’s been a long time since the Berlin Wall fell—1989 was 27 years ago, before most millennials were born. And the splintering of the USSR left us with a number of interesting kleptocracies, but ones where the dominant theme was selling off the assets of the state or stealing them, frequently to or by relatives or buddies of the prime minister. Expanding the state’s role in ownership and production was not the direction in which any of these noble leaders were going.

If you read candidate Sanders’ web site, you will find twenty-two “issues,” things such as “Improving the Rural Economy” and “Fighting for Disability Rights” and “Caring for our Veterans.” Goodness, this could be Ted Cruz’ list of issues. Well, there is “Reforming Wall Street” but Donald Trump believes in that, and there is “Fighting for Women’s rights” which Hilary Clinton certainly agrees with. So where’s the socialist part of all this?

Even the backup action plan for one of his most “socialist” of issues – Income and Wealth Inequality—is really a laundry list of thirteen numbered initiatives, including some that seem not exactly on the mark: guaranteeing a certain amount of “family leave,” for example, so that “parents have the time they need to bond with their babies.” Or enacting a universal child care and pre-kindergarten program. What does this have to do with socialism? This is stuff that people from across the bounds of the political spectrum could support—who doesn’t believe that parents should bond with their babies, for goodness sake?

Maybe we should define just what has been traditionally meant by “socialism” as applied to the economy of a country, since the other parts of the Sanders platform—equal rights for women and minorities, a distaste for war, independence for your colonies (I didn’t know we still had colonies)—have been parts of the “progressive” agenda, but not really differentiators for socialist regimes.

Merriam Webster, the editors dictionary.com, and Wikipedia all generally agree that socialism means an economic system where the government owns the means of production—factories, farms, the local Walmart (perhaps now called Govmart), the schools and hospitals, pretty much everything. This has been tried to varying degrees in varying countries, with results that over the long run have proven unsatisfactory, as this approach has been abandoned almost everywhere.

But almost everywhere is not everywhere. We have an excellent example of this organizing principle being given an extensive test not ninety miles off our shores. It’s called Cuba.

We visited Cuba for two weeks in November, on a trip sponsored by the Pacific Horticultural Journal. We only went to see gardens and flowers. There were some gardens on the itinerary, and we did see some flowers, but England with Sissinghurst and Kew it was not. It was rather a general overview of historic or otherwise appropriate sites, and these were the same sites that everyone on a tour of Cuba seemed to be visiting, as we saw the same people emerging from the same tour busses over and over. The Bay of Pigs museum (no flowers), the Malecon, the famous and now crumbling seaside boulevard (no flowers) in Havana, Ernest Hemingway’s house in San Francisco de Paula (one or two flowers), the world heritage site in the city of Trinidad with restored colonial architecture but no flowers, the mountain retreat of Topes de Collantes (one garden with some flowers but mostly trees) which you get to by riding in Soviet era trucks. We ate in government owned restaurants and stayed in government owned hotels. We ate in a few “paradors,” private restaurants that have been allowed to operate in recent years. They were generally head and shoulders better than the government run places.

We had a government approved guide, but this never seemed oppressive or limiting. We were given tour guide quality facts, and we saw things and asked questions in our innocence that were probably not on the standard script. It was all interesting, as in, “Gee we have never been here before, we didn’t know that.” We saw the old US 1950’s cars that have been lovingly maintained. Because we were on a “people to people” tour, the only kind that the US currently allows, we did actually talk to some people who were not checking us into a hotel or taking our order in a restaurant, but not many. Mostly we talked to our guides. They seemed pretty honest.

One of our first stops was an organic farm of about 11 acres, run by an enterprising Cuban woman, really a truck farm for the private restaurants in Havana. This was particularly notable because we had been told, more than a dozen times so far, that Cuba imports 80 percent of its food. Yet here we are in the middle of beautiful fields of lettuce and carrots and other vegetables. There is also a large composting operation using California red worms that, our guide told us, came from the Philippines. There were lots of workers and no tractors. Because we are nice and generous Americans, and because we really liked her, and because the guidebooks are full of advice like “bring small bars of soap with you to give as gifts to the Cubans you meet,” one of our party said, “What’s the one thing that’s on the top of your wish list?” We anticipated that the answer would be a goat or a small hand tractor or a motorized John Deere cart. Her answer: “A Home Depot.” She had a very hard time finding and buying even simple hand tools to run the farm. She had visited a Home Depot while on a state visit to organic farms in the US, and lover the availability of garden and farm supplies. Several of our fellow tour members were appalled at this endorsement of big box commerce.

We asked how she got into the business. “The state gave me the land,” she said. Some of us were more curious about this than others. “Well, do you own it?” we asked? No. Do you lease it? No but I pay five percent of my revenue to the government. The farm is in what amounts to a suburb of Havana. We wondered if the expansion of the capital would displace it. “Can the government take the land away from you if they decide they need it to build a shopping center?,” we asked.

“Oh, they would never do that,” she responded.

But consider this: there’s no sense in buying a tractor, because they aren’t for sale, but more important this kind of capital investment takes three or four years to pay back. If you buy one and the government appropriates your farm, it leaves you and your tractor there, sitting by the side of the road. She wasn’t around in 1959 when the new Castro government did just that. To everyone. Well, if you’re going to have the government run the means of production, it’s good to start with owning all the land.