Who cares? They have great healthcare and a high literacy rate!

From the Financial Times of London:

Mario Chanes de Armas, who has died in Miami at the age of 80, sailed from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 with Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara to launch the Cuban revolution. Two years after the revolution's success, after criticising Castro's lurch towards Moscow and communism, he was summarily jailed by his former comrade for 30 years.

Chanes de Armas served his full sentence, six years of it in solitary confinement in a windowless cell in which he could barely stand up, making him the longest-serving political prisoner in the western hemisphere at the time.

Chanes spent longer in jail than Nelson Mandela. Unlike Mandela, however, the stories of Chanes and his fellow Cuban political prisoners received little publicity outside the Cuban exile community in Miami. Although he had fought alongside Mr Castro at every stage of the revolution, Chanes's name, and image, were personally stricken from Cuba's history books by Mr Castro himself.

Longer than Mandela, but for virtually the same reasons? It's not a surprise, though. The US mainstream media, which leans clearly to the left, has always overemphasized the misdeeds of rightist dictators (like the South African apartheid regime, or Chile's Pinochet) over those of the Left (Castro, USSR, Venezuela's Chávez). Indeed, guys like Castro get cults of personality following them (Oliver Stone, anyone? Or certain liberal members of Congress?) because, well, look at what he's "done!" Free medical care! No illiteracy! OK, and South Africa and Chile were the economic powerhouses of their prospective continents. So?