They say only the good die young, so it should come as no surprise that Fidel Castro made it to age 90 before he finally croaked.  Of course, his passing gave rise to torrents of praise from the Left.  Once again proving that, if they didn’t stand for hypocrisy, they’d stand for nothing at all, the same good Liberal comrades who call Donald Trump a fascist, a tyrant and a racist, heaped adulation on a totalitarian Communist dictator, who has murdered tens of thousands, imprisoned many more, forced his people into abject poverty, and whose policies have caused more than 10% of the Cuban population to flee the island nation.  But Leftists see none of this.  What does Cuba produce?  Cigars.  I thought Leftists were opposed to smoking.  The Pope likes to lecture the United States about social justice, but he referred to Fidel as a “deceased dignitary.”  Pope Francis apparently is unconcerned for the dignity of the thousands of political prisoners rotting in Castro’s cages, but I suppose Marxist birds of a feather must flock together.  The British Labour Party leader called Fidel “an internationalist, and champion of social justice.”  Castro was an internationalist.  He sent his henchman, Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna throughout Latin America to sow the seeds of revolution.  Che even spread Fidel’s “social justice” to the Congo and Rwanda, where thousands more innocent people were brutally butchered by military dictators supported by Cuba.  Despite the best efforts of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces to see that Che remained a live failure, instead of a dead martyr, the Bolivian government had other ideas, so when they caught Che inciting revolution in their country in 1967, they shot the son of a bitch.  His death inspires T-shirt sales to this day.  But I digress.  True to form, the media fell all over itself praising Castro.  It’s strange that media people claim the right to tell us what is good and what is evil, yet they never take notice of the evils of Communism.  Journalists denounce American elections that don’t go their way, but find no fault in a man who abolished all elections in 1959, and who would throw each and every one of them in prison for the slightest criticism.  No wonder Il Duce Obama admired Fidel Castro so much.  The New York Times crowed that Castro had “transformed Cuba.”  There is truth in this.  When he seized power in 1959, Cuba was an admittedly imperfect capitalist nation, which, like every other nation on Earth, featured both rich and poor.  Cuba’s GDP in 1959 was greater than those of most other Latin American nations, and greater than the GDP’s of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece.  But its former leader was Fulgencio Batista, a military dictator, and the Left welcomes only Communist dictators.  Enter Fidel Castro, a Communist military dictator who set out to “fundamentally transform” Cuba.  Does that sound familiar?  Cuba’s GDP today puts it behind every economy in Latin America save Haiti and Nicaragua, two other hellholes.   The workers were being oppressed by Batista right?  Wrong.  Before the Castro revolution, the average hourly wage of a Cuban worker exceeded that of workers in France and Germany.  In Fidel’s worker’s paradise, Cuba has achieved the income equality sought by American Leftists like Bernie Sanders.  Everyone in Cuba is equally destitute and miserable.  Cuba has free education, and there is no shortage of jobs for recent college graduates there.  They are forced to work for the government at $9 a month.  Canada’s Justin Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary orator” and for “significantly improving healthcare.”  To that I say, Hitler was a legendary orator, and how did that turn out?  But there is great healthcare in Cuba, isn’t there? Well, not so much.   Cuban doctors are paid about $30 a month.  But the cost of living is lower, right?  No.  A gallon of milk is $7, and a pound of potatoes costs a day’s pay.  But they have free healthcare, right?  Not so much.  Cuba exports doctors and nurses to Venezuela in return for oil.  Good hospitals are reserved for the elites, and visiting foreigners who can pay in hard currency.  For the average Cuban, the hospitals lack the minimum requirements needed to take care of their patients.  Most of these facilities are filthy, and patients have to bring their own towels, bed sheets and pillows, or they would have to lay down on dirty bare mattresses stained with blood and other body fluids.  Antibiotics are among the least expensive drugs in America.  In Cuba, public pharmacies are nearly empty, and antibiotics are available only on the black market.  In short, Cuba is a society in which the people must do without basic consumer goods available almost everywhere else on Earth.  I’m tempted to say, at least Castro, like Mussolini, made the trains run on time, but due to shortages of spare parts and fuel, they don’t.  Cubans lack the basic human rights that Leftists try to tell us are lacking here in America.  Add to this a failed Communist economic system that even Cuba’s former sponsors, the Soviets, finally had to admit didn’t work, and you have the recipe for the disaster that is Cuba.  The only thing Cuba got from its association with the Soviet Union was more poverty, some military equipment, and a chance to set off a worldwide nuclear war, which they almost did in 1962.  Simply put, Cuba is North Korea with palm trees.  In the final analysis, you can judge conditions in a nation by whether people are flocking to it, or are fleeing from it.  Before Castro, Cuba was a place that attracted European immigrants.  After Castro, millions have fled, preferring the prospect of drowning on a leaky raft to continued life in Castro’s transformed Cuba.  As a result, I say, adios Fidel, you should burn in Hell.