Castro resigns

I agree with rombald on this one. Yes, Cuba is repressive and you can end up in jail for being "counterrevolutionary" and all that, but if you adjust for population size, a lot more Latin Americans in all the friendly "banana republics" have ended up extrajudicially dead in a ditch or "disappeared" courtesy of some death squad.

Absolute bunk.

For half a century, tens of thousands of ordinary Cubans have regularly braved treacherous, shark-infested waters on homemade rafts to escape the hell-hole Fidel Castro dug. Cuban national sports teams and youth groups can't travel anywhere abroad without risking defectors, even though such defectors must abandon their families and everything they hold dear.

Marxist agitprop aside, no other Latin American authoritarian regime has produced anywhere near that level of desperation among the people it ruled and terrorized.

Tell that to the families of political prisoners in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua who had family members executed in football stadiums by soldiers carrying U.S.-financed weapons.

I'm not an apologist for Central American militarism, and there were certainly serious human rights violations committed in those countries.

But not on the scale, and not over the same length of time, as Castro has inflicted injustice on the people of Cuba. Or perhaps we should say the people who haven't yet been able to flee from Cuba, since such a large part of its population has.

In free and fair elections, the peoples of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua are have consistenly rejected the Marxist and socialist governments many of those "political prisoners" wished to impose upon them. If there were ever free and fair elections in Cuba, the Castro regime would be gone immediately.

I'm not an apologist for Communist dictatorships. I wouldn't wish such a political system on anyone.

But you talk about taking all these risks to escape Cuba...well, how many Mexicans die in the southwestern desert every year, trying to get out of Mexico? Hundreds. They aren't escaping Marxism, they're escaping extreme poverty.