Fidel, like a lot of communist leaders of his generation, was a murderous brute. No question. The thing I struggle with, though, is whether he was worse—and if so, by how much—than supposedly democratic regimes that, through their policies and the implementation of same, inflicted similar brutality on their own…

Because it wasn’t just the opinion of someone affected by Castro. It was an attack on the already marginalized opinion that maybe Castro is not Hitler.

Any time I hear a cuban-american talk about how US policy should be to eliminate Castro, I ask two questions: 1) What was your family’s status under Batista? 2) What would you replace Castro with, citing positive examples from other Latin American countries?

You’re giving someone a platform to call Fidel Castro Hitler, without comment.

If you guys ran an unchallenged opinion from some other reactionary conservative demographic in the United States, you would rightfully be criticized for it. But of course you never would do that, would you? The claim that Fidel Castro’s crimes are equivalent in scale to those of Adolf Hitler is so fucking absurd to…

It’s a sticky wicket considering Batista wasn’t in any way a good dude either...

No, more like “Fidel was responsible for many civil rights abuses and must be judged harshly for them, but comparing him to Adolf Hitler is absurd on a number of dimensions, and while we’re busy judging a dead guy let’s remember that we are currently supporting dictatorships that have inflicted far worse on their…

Le Batard usually is able to handle topics with a little bit of nuance. This probably hits a little to close to home but I would expect more from him. Castro is about so much more than just a bad man dieing. It is about the U.S. foreign policy for Latin/South America over the past 100 years. It is about how the…

Yea. Castro was a terrible guy but he replaced a terrible guy. Thing is, we in the US (mostly) get the side of the argument from, let’s face it, people who were doing ok or better under the first terrible guy. The fact that a major sticking point in improvements of relations is property that was seized by Castro says…

Well I’m mad at Cuban exiles with providing a nihilistic lunatic with his margin of victory in Florida.

Maybe I’m reading different parts of the internet, but most of the “sympathetic” takes regarding Castro that I saw weren’t so much about being nice to Castro as they were usually about one of two things.

I think five things are often missing from the one-side condemnations of Castro by Cuban-Americans -

I think, like most things, people and systems aren’t binary. Like, sure, Castro brought improved education and universal healthcare to Cuba. He also horded a huge fortune while his people literally could not own microwaves, imprisoned gays in labor camps, never fulfilled his promise of free elections, jailed and…