Admiring Castro, A Better Man Than The One He Replaced

I'M NOT ENTIRELY SURE why I always liked Fidel Castro. Maybe I felt sorry for him. If anyone needs sympathy, its the head of state of a tiny island nation ninety miles from an imperialistic super power hell bent on your and your country's economic isolation and destruction. Being a socialist might contribute to my admiration of Fidel. But I'm a democratic socialist, a Bernie Sanders type, and I abhor totalitarian regimes and brutal dictatorships as much as the next Yankee imperialist. What Castro did was to overthrow a brutal and repressive capitalistic dictatorship which had broad U.S. support and replace it with a socialistic dictatorship which was soon met with unbridled American enmity. The difference is that the American corporate controlled government never met a capitalistic dictator it didn't like and support, and never met a socialistic dictator it didn't hate and seek to undermine, and that includes those duly elected in democratic processes, such as have been elected and overthrown repeatedly throughout Latin America, thank you very much CIA and the Truman doctrine. And now, the Cuban community in Miami dances in the streets, in a display of questionable decency. As if most of them were even alive to suffer under Castro. Those people who fled Cuba when Castro came to power: would they rather that Batista had stayed in power? If so, why? Because they somehow benefited from Batista's cruel despotism? I always believed, and still do, that the U.S. embargo against Cuba during Castro's rule was brutal, barbaric, hypocritical, detrimental to American interests. Corporate America loved Cuba before Castro, with its despotic ruler favorable to corporate American imperialism. I always believed that Castro would outlast all of the American presidents who tried to strangle him and his country, and I was right. No economic system, capitalism or socialism included, could have flourished in Cuba under the conditions imposed on it by the United States from 1960 until a couple of years ago. So don't give me this "Cuba is proof that socialism doesn't work" crap. In fact it works everywhere it exists without being strangled and suffocated to death; it works just like the rest of us work; under conditions in which it is given a reasonable chance to flourish. It works in Denmark, the world's wealthiest country per capita, and it works just fine in the United States, thank you very much. If you think otherwise, go buy your own highway, and your own city street system, and your own police department, and your own fire department. You get the point. At this point the best course might be to include Cuba, Hispanola, and Mexico and Canada along the the U.S. in a loose confederation of nation states, beginning with free trade, and continuing towards open borders and expanded citizenship for all in the new United States of North America. The current nationalistic arrangements are rapidly becoming obsolete, and cannot endure forever, notwithstanding Brexit, notwithstanding Trump, notwithstanding this weird and bizarre conservative backlash against globalism currently en vogue under the curious moniker "populism". I always thought "populism" was a mass political movement of a country's poor and working poor against the wealthy power holding elite, and I assure you, that aint even close to what's going on now. If it were, we'd be hearing a lot more about equalization of wealth Castro style, and less about making America great "again".