How true - we built a wall around Cuba which only empowered the Castro regime. Things ARE getting better - and allowing the free exchange of ideas will only improve things. I was there 30 years ago and while we were talking to three young men in the central park, some plainclothes police came up and took them away. (One came to our hotel the next morning to let us know they were OK - they were just being harassed for talking to Americans). It is much more open now.

Castro will be remembered by many as a brutal dictator. Many of these "many" are folks who had done very well under the previous dictator (lest we forget the history of the Cuban Revolution). Castro was no saint. BUT - his people will say that while they have no freedom of speech, they do have the freedom to have health care and education. The health care system in Cuba, while starving for equipment and supplies, is one of the most organized systems I have ever seen - and in no poor country do the citizens have such access to care. His Latin America School of Medicine trains thousands of doctors - at no cost - to return to their countries to provide health care to the needy. He has sent doctors to poor countries throughout the world - even offered to send a medical disaster team to New Orleans after Katrina (offer rejected by the US). There is a huge billboard across from the medical school which reads: "In Brotherhood and Solidarity with the People". I always think that it would be nice to teach/preach just a LITTLE bit of that philosophy in our medical schools!

So - his legacy will be a very bipolar one - one of opposites - and one pretty much completely in the "eye of the beholder".

How does that threaten the US in any way? Are you pretending that a few warheads with inferior delivery systems somehow gives North Korea offensive potential? Shortly after launching a few against us, their entire country would be a glass parking lot. The real reason the US postures against North Korea is to keep it perpetually vulnerable to the kind of bullying we visited on Iraq. If dangerous weapons were a problem, the Bush administration would not have gone after Iraq, which did not have any, but North Korea, which did.