Although American corporations evicted from Cuba would love us all to share your hatred of Fidel Castro, the fact is that Cuba's current lack of prosperty has more to do with the US trade embargo of the pass forty nine years.

The most notable violation of human rights in Cuba is Guantanamo Bay prison; the most notable export from Cuba are free medical educations for improvised people of Latin America.

The lack of media freedom inside Cuba after so many decades is also only possible due to the US embargo, not Fidel's superior management skills. In one ironic twist, the US embargo has benefited the people of Cuba by largely protecting them from the US greed-is-good globalization of Cuban culture.

As an Australian I would be more concerned about the psychopathic serial-killer military culture of the TNI who slaughtered a half million of their own people during 1965/66, who successfully invaded East Timor in 1975, unsuccessfully invaded West Papua in 1962, and who have been cruelly oppressing the Provinces of Indonesia ever since Sukarno betrayed and crushed the United States of Indonesia government in 1950.

Of course I am an Australia concerned about human rights and rouge self-funding militaries wishing to expand their borders and indoctrinate the Javanese population with anti-western nonsense. Hope that helps put things back in perspective, All Best. :)

Daeron, while I share your concerns about Indonesia/TNI, I don't think we need to take an either/or approach here. The fact of the matter is that, as John Ballantyne points out, the Castro regime is an oppressive and murderous tyranny that should have been nipped in the bud.

As it wasn't, we have seen droves of people flee in exile (across a Berlin Wall of water), export of ideology and death to Africa (and what wonders it achieved there...), and the degeneration of Cuba into something which makes a 'banana republic' look really nice.

If the horrible US embargo is to blame, why have so many other non-embargoed Communist and totalitarian economies collapsed as basket cases? Don’t blame America; blame Karl Marx.

It is tragic that this Fasco-Marxist will likely escape justice for his crimes. I certainly don’t see the likes of Amnesty International calling for a trial – which is why I congratulate John Ballantyne for raising the issue.

John Ballantyne has written a very important piece and I congratulate him for this.

Unfortunately, as can be seen by the above post, there are still left-wing people who have an enormous faith in the tyrannical government of Cuba, despite the overwhelming evidence of ongoing human-rights violations in that unhappy country.

Those who support Fidel Castro are totalitarians who care very little about civil liberties and the fact that millions of innocent people have lost their frreedom and are entirely subject to a murderous regime which gives an average salary of only $20 per month in Cuban pesos for the working class to survive.

From 1898 to 1958, however, pre-Castro Cuba was a fairly prosperous society, and found itself in 1958 with a per-capita income that was topped in Latin America only by Argentina’s, Venezuela’s and Puerto Rico’s. Only Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil had higher total industrial production.

The large Cuban middle class was socially active, liberal, and thriving. One member of the labour force out of five could be counted as skilled worker, and the illiteracy rate was among the lowest in Latin America.

In absolute terms, the small island had the third highest number of doctors in the subcontinent, the highest number of TV sets, and the highest level of movie attendance.

In a few decades, however, a quite prosperous society passed from a condition of sustainable socio-economic development to a state of organized inhumanity, with a ruthless communist government deliberatly planning the elimination of thousands of so-called political 'enemies'.

Even so, many leftists of totalitarian mind keep arguing that left-wing dictators such as Fidel Castro are ‘progressive’ leaders, even though he is ahead of a government that consistently restricts basic human rights, including freedom of expression, and maintains harsh prison conditions to ‘political prisoners’ whose only crime was daring to disagree from those who are in power

Correct DamianW, we don't need to take an either/or approach. Unfortunately others do use selective vision, they ignore vital regional issues while George Bush cries about Darfur and Mr Ballantyne now cries about Cuba?

The problems in Iraq, Timor Leste, PNG, and West Papua are the same issue - colonization. West Papua was the first attempt at neo-colonization and has a foreign military occupation force; and East Timor is still adjusting to the changing of its puppet masters from Jakarta to local 'representatives'; but the nation's wealth is to be harvested for foreign interests.

Ever since NNGPM on behalf of Shell, Mobil, and Chevron discovered Ertsberg in 1936; West Papua's wealth has disrupted de-colonization and other nations have made many billions mining West Papua; result is that the West Papuan people now enjoy less civil freedom and quality of life than they did in 1962.

Unable to get a US license for "Ertsberg" - Mountain of Ore - they kept Ertsberg secret. Then in March 1959 the Dutch announced they were looking for the mountain source of gold they found flowing into our Arafura Sea, soon Rockefeller's Freeport Sulphur was asking a Dutch company for a partnership via which to lodge a claim for the Timika area (Ertsberg) as a possible copper deposit.

After the Indonesian military proved unable to take the territory itself, *inside* the White House a McGeorge Bundy and Robert Komer began telling Kennedy that he had to force the Netherlands to sell the people and lands of West Papua to Indonesian control.

As a pro-business Liberal voter I am not going to sacrifice Australia's interests and responsibility for the benfit of a few corrupt American corporations. Most US corporations are decent citizens, but there are some very skilled and corrupt business cultures still causing woe from Cuba to West Papua to Iraq. Lets be clear about whose interests we are concerned about - I don't care if George Bush's fiscal backers at Bechtel and Freeport McMoRan go bankrupt; I'd rather have prosperty in our region including the West Papuan people's rights.

Augusto... the pre-castro picture you paint of Cuba seems a little rosier than I suspect it was.

You're ignoring the oppression at the hands of Batista, and your post would seem to indicate that the colonial stranglehold that Spain had on the nation was all well and good.

I'm certainly not saying Castro's reign was any better, but I hardly think that it was some kind of caribbean utopia before hand.

We can argue about Castro's crimes but this is interesting coming from Newsweek, the publication of the National Civic Council. In the 1980s Washington effectively was engaged in a brutal war against the Church (which was organising the poor) with the backing of the Vatican and, it turns out, the support of the NCC. Bishops, nuns and so on were murdered for the crime of liberation theology. If Castro will die unpunished then in this he will surely not be alone.