Writing in The New Statesman, British parliamentarian John McDonnell, the Right Honorable Gentleman from 1968, offers high praise for Cuban communism and demonstrates a level of credulity not seen since John Reed vacationed in Moscow. But don’t mention Moscow, because, as McDonnell bizarrely writes, “unlike Stalin’s Russia there have never been any Cuban gulags.” What’s not to like, he asks, about a country that provides “free prescriptions, free care for the elderly, free university education.”

So again, the health and education canard returns. What all of these pols and pundits lazily presume is that if the state of Cuban health care and education have markedly improved on Castro’s watch, surely the situation was dire during the final years of the Batista dictatorship.

Well, not exactly. In 1959 Cuba had 128.6 doctors and dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it 22nd globally—that is, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. In infant mortality tables, Cuba ranked one of the best in the world, with 5.8 deaths per 100,000 babies, compared to 9.5 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1958 Cuba’s adult literacy rate was 80 percent, higher than that of its colonial grandfather in Spain, and the country possessed one of the most highly-regarded university systems in the Western hemisphere.

Cuba improved, as have most countries, on some of these indices in the years since the revolution. As reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin points out, “countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil have posted equal gains in literacy during the same time period without resorting to totalitarian governments.” (For more reason coverage over the years on Cuba and Castro, go here.)

This is precisely the point: Punctual trains and spiffy highway networks hardly mitigate the horror of dictatorship. Such “advances,” like the illusory gains of the Cuban Revolution, are best achieved through policies that promote economic and political freedom. You would think, almost 20 yeas after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that journalists would understand that.

Oh, and as for the canard the Cuba never had gulags? Lies.

Four dissidents freed this week after five years in inhumane conditions in a Cuban prison have revealed the dark side of Fidel Castro’s regime.

The four - José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, Omar Pernet Hernández, Alejandro González and Pedro Pablo Álvarez - described regular beatings, humiliation and arbitrary punishment with long periods of solitary confinement in cramped cells with cement beds.

Arriving in Spain to be reunited with their families, they exposed the routine abuse of political prisoners which marked Castro’s five decades in power.

The four were part of a group of 75 dissidents who were jailed in 2003 by Castro’s regime in a move which caused an international outcry. The official reason given for their release was “health reasons”.

...

Mr Castillo, 50, a journalist who wrote articles critical of the regime, told The Sunday Telegraph: “It was terrible. It was like being in a desert in which sometimes there is no water, there is no food, you are tortured and you are abused.

“This was not torture in the textbook way with electric prods, but it was cruel and degrading. They would beat you for no reason even when you were in hospital.

“At other times they would search you for no reason, stripping you bare and humiliating you. There was one particular commander at a jail in Santa Clara who seemed to take delight in handing out beatings to the prisoners.”

Mr Castillo, who claims he was denied proper medical aid for diabetes and heart problems, added: “We are nothing more than a reflection of the human cost of the fight being waged by the Cuban people.”

While the dissidents tasted freedom, 58 of the original 75 jailed for long terms in 2003 are still behind bars.

It is estimated another 250 political prisoners languish in Cuban prisons. Mr Castillo was not hopeful that the departure of El Comandante from the helm of power would bring great changes.

...

Omar Pernet, a steel worker also in his fifties, was jailed for being an opposition activist, suffered an accident while being moved from one jail to another in 2004.

He also suffered lung problems in jail, a broken leg, a broken collar bone.

He said he was kept in solitary confinement in a cell measuring four metres square with a cement bed.

In all, he has spent 21 years behind bars for opposing the regime. Mr Pernet was jailed for 20 years after being accused of aiding the US secret services - a charge he says was trumped up.

Why do we go on and on about Castro? Because Fidelphilia is one of the symptoms of what I call the Credulous Left—the faction of the left wing that believes anything bad they hear about America and anything good they hear about our enemies. From Noam Chomsky on, they will deny Killing Fields, proclaim Saddam’s Iraq a paradise, praise Cuban health care and condemn the killing of terrorists. Moore, in going to Cuba and proclaiming everything he saw wonderful, has become a standard-bearer of the Credulous Left. And with every truth that leaks out about Fidel’s Cuba, we can see just how credulous he is.