When a five-decades-long dictator dies, it is customary to hear analysts offer up the following kind of balanced blather: “He was neither as bad as his opponents believed nor as beloved as his supporters insisted.”

Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro certainly enjoyed a cult of personality courtesy of self-styled humanists who still contort themselves to overlook his horrific record of human rights abuses, murder and repression.  But his detractors almost always had more direct experience in dealing with his radius of damage than his defenders.