Video surfaces showing Bernie Sanders praise Cuban ruler Fidel Castro in 1986

Senator Bernie Sanders was filmed giving a 1986 lecture in which he praised the Cuban revolution led by Communist ruler Fidel Castro.

‘I remember being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba,’ Sanders is seen telling students at the University of Vermont in 1986.

‘It seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against ugly rich people.’

Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, at the time the tape was recorded, which was posted to Twitter on Wednesday by a user called, The Reagan Battalion.

He told the students how he became so disillusioned by John F. Kennedy when he ran for president in the early 1960s that he wanted to ‘puke’ because of his hardline anti-communist stance.

Video posted to social media shows Senator Bernie Sanders praising Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution during a lecture to students at the University of Vermont in 1986. Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, at the time

Video posted to social media shows Senator Bernie Sanders praising Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution during a lecture to students at the University of Vermont in 1986. Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, at the time

‘Kennedy was saying Nixon was too soft on communism in Cuba,’ Sanders said.

‘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.’

Sanders is one of the leading candidates in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

The senator from Vermont is a well-known - and self-described - democratic socialist, and has remained independent in the Senate even though he caucuses with Democrats.

He was elected to the U.S. House in 1991 and to the Senate in 2007.

This is not the first time that 30-year-old clips have surfaced showing Sanders making controversial remarks about American foreign policy toward communist countries in Latin America.

During his unsuccessful bid to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in 2015-16, a video from 1985 was dredged up in which Sanders is seen heaping praise on Castro.

The grainy 1985 interview footage from Chittenden County, Vermont, shows Sanders praising Castro's policies on

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