Rogues Gallery

Well, it's been an illustrious career. Please contribute below for his gold watch.

Who:

"El comandante," world-record holding dictator, baseball enthusiast, bombastic bore, the Bearded Pitcher: Destroyer of Nations. Read here.

Why:

Like Washington was a great man for what he didn't do (assume lordship over a new nation), Castro is infamous for doing what the greater man resisted. Imagine for a moment what could have been Castro's first speech:

Companeros, I stand here in front of the countrymen I love to proclaim that I come to liberate Cuba from Batista, not take his place. I trust the great people of Cuba will make this land one of freedom and prosperity. Elections will be held next Tuesday.

But noooooo. He proceeds to consolidate auto-domination over Cuba and drive the most prosperous Latin-American country at the time, with standards of living approaching those in Europe, with net immigration from the first world, strait into the ground. A pathetic nation, the whore house to the capitalists he hates, the ultimate "nice place to visit," but one in which nobody likes to live (as evidenced by the thousands of people who risk their lives to escape the island prison); Cuba now grovels for the scraps of idiotic Castro-groupie Hugo Chavez.

Still, as a demonstration of my own moderation, Castro doesn't belong in the class of mass-murderers Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Castro only killed those necessary to maintain power (about 114,000). He could have done worse, I suppose.

But:

He improved education and health care.

Education and health care are easy to provide if you don't have to pay the teachers or doctors. And, education in Cuba is designed to buttress Fidel's lies, not to give one the information necessary to make an informed decision. One would need a variety of opinions for that to happen. What good is it to be able to read then if you can only read what the government wants you to?

Didn't American occupation of the West improve the literacy of the Native American? Slave owners took care of their slaves' health, right?

And, who seriously believes that Cuba, pre-Castro, was filled with illiterate sick people? Come on, now.

For the contrary opinion, here are Castro's greatest qualities, according to Cuban Communists.