What did Bernie's comments on Cuba at the last #DemDebate mean? Here's where he (and Obama) stand

[Fresh_Start]

26. estimates

DEATHS
The late and widely respected University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, ..., reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000.

Yet the Cuba Archive, ... uses a much lower figure of 7,193...
“Those are the ones we’ve documented, using either information released by the government or the testimony of eyewitnesses, not hearsay or guesswork,” says Maria Werlau, the group’s president. “We know the numbers are much, much higher, but this is what we can actually document so far.”

... figuring out what deaths to include. The 5,000 or so executed in the immediate aftermath of Castro’s 1959 takeover — sometimes after kangaroo-court trials, sometimes without even that — are included in nearly everybody’s figures. (Figurative talk about a balance sheet for the human costs of the revolution turns quite literal when the executions are discussed; for a time during the 1960s, the Cuban government extracted most of the blood from the victims before they were shot, then sold it to other communist countries for $50 a pint.)

But what about the Cuban soldiers killed during Castro’s military adventures in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s? (The official death toll: 4,000. But a Cuban Air Force general who defected in 1987 put the number killed in Angola alone at 10,000.) And the county’s suicide rate has tripled under Castro. Should the 1,500 or so Cubans who kill themselves each year be included? If not all of them, how about the 10 a year who commit suicide — or die of medical neglect — in prison?

The largest number of deaths is believed to be those lost at sea trying to escape Cuba on makeshift rafts. For years, the Cuba Archive used an estimate worked up by Harvard-trained economist Armando Lago of about 77,000 rafter deaths by 2003.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article118282148.html