I am from the left of center quite proudly and strongly center unity ALP.
I hope one day the left can stop giving total support to every one who is seen as leftist.
Castro is a dictator and no saint, maybe he is no better or worse than Bush.
And when we need to tell the world just how bad Bush is they may listen if we do not hide grubs like this under our hair shirts.
Al Gore America needs you , the world needs you.

Markob… I think you should let people know what so-called "liberation" theology means.

In his 1987 book O Socialismo Como Desafio Teológico (‘Socialism as a Theological Challenge’), Leonardo Boff, the leading advocate of liberation theology in Latin America, declared that the oppressive former communist regimes in Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union, "offer[ed] the best objective possibility of living more easily in the spirit of the Gospels and of observing the Commandments".

Returning from a visit to the former Soviet Union in 1987, just a few years before the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Boff also argued that these notoriously oppressive regimes were "highly ethical and… morally clean", and that he had "not noticed any restrictions in those countries on freedom of expression"

BBC Online today has the headline "Castro 'to be fit to hold power'". If true, his recent illness must have led to radical changes in his approach!

John Ballantyne has raised the anomaly that the outcry demanding that Pinochet be brought to justice been unmatched by demands that his even more murderous fellow Latin American military dictator Castro be tried for his crimes.
A second anomaly has been inadvertently raised by the mention of Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners at Guatanamo, for all its faults, have not suffered anything like the abuses perpetrated for the last nearly fifty years against opponents of the Havana regime just over the fence in Cuban jails, but there has never been any outcry from human rights advocates remotely resembling the criticism of Guantanamo. First-hand descriptions of conditions in Castro's jails can be found in the recently published From The Gulag To The killing Fields, edited by Paul Hollander.

"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."

It is now when Spain and other European countries, plus Canada, are exploiting Cuban workers by doing business with their oppressor. Melia, who runs several large hotels in Cuba where Cubans are not allowed, must use the workers that are supplied by Cuba's fascist regime. They pay Castro in euros, he pays his slave workers in Cuban pesos and pockets the difference.
The same thing happens with the slave doctors that Castro ships all over the world. Those countries pay him with oil, like Venezuela, that he then sells in the Bahamas at a much higher price or hard currencies and Castro pays his slaves in pesos and laughs all the way to the bank. No wonder his fortune is now close to one billion dollars according to Forbes magazine.
It is inconceivable that there are people who 50 years later still think that Castro is a champion of the poor. The fact is that he is more fascist than Batista, Pinochet, Somoza, Franco, Duvalier and Stroesner combined.

People keep on blaming the embargo for Cuba's poverty. That's rubbish. The US is the only country with a trade embargo against Cuba; no other country is prohibited from trading with them. And in spite of this "embargo", the US has sold over hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food to the island; the figure was $87 million in 2004 alone. In 2005, it was $338 million (although that included "agricultural products", whatever that means). Yet somehow there are still shortages.

Don't blame the US for Cuba's woes. Blame the terrible government, and it's inabilities to create wealth for it's people. Blame Castro. *That's* the true source of Cuba's woes.