This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 28th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As the government of Cuba plans official mourning Cuban refugees in the United States

celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator who cracked

down on free speech, free association, and entrepreneurship while also working to spread

socialism throughout Latin America.

Juan Carlos Adago says that for the average Cuban right now,

Castro's death has more symbolic value than anything.

Well, history should remember him as what he was, which is a dictator, not a president, as Prime Minister Trudeau

said, but as a person who helped to power for over 50 years through violence and by calling off elections and imposing a Stalinist dictatorship in Cuba.

There is a lot of discussion about people who claim that there are merits on his rule on Cuba,

particularly when it comes to health care and education, which according to international

standards, these are areas where Cuba excels, at least compared to Latin America, but again you don't need to impose a dictatorship in order to have

Universal health care or universal access to education look at my country country. My country, Costa Rica, has universal

universal health care, universal education, and we didn't have a dictatorship. We

didn't even have an army since 1948.

But certainly the greatest legacy of Fidel Castro will be the fact that he remained in power for

50 years, that he impoverished Cuba, that he tried to export his

revolution to other parts of the world, particularly in Latin America, and that in doing so,

he claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who died in communist, like communist insurgencies, and who died in civil warfare in other countries.

So at some point, if Ere Castro say that history will have sold him,

I hope he doesn't.

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