Fidel Castro became the leader of Cuba on February 16, 1959. Castro hired a public relations firm and, between April 15th and 26th, he visited the United States. Dwight Eisenhower refused to meet with him. On May 17th, Castro made an important decision.

On May 17, 1959, Castro signed into law the First Agrarian Reform, which limited landholdings to 993 acres (4 km²) per owner and forbade foreign land ownership…

Soon friction with the U.S. developed as the new government began expropriating property owned by major U.S. corporations (United Fruit in particular) and announced plans to base the compensation on the artificially low property valuations that the companies themselves had kept to a fraction of their true value so that their taxes would be negligible.[34]

By October, Eisenhower had decided to try to remove Castro from power. The Church Committee discovered eight separate CIA plots to assassinate Castro between 1960-65. That same period saw the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missle Crisis.

From the beginning of Castro’s reign, the United States made it clear that we did not want to have normal relations with him. Once he was spurned on his American tour, he turned to the Soviets for aid. The combination of his decisions to mess with foreign holdings and his coziness with the Ruskies, led our wisemen to want him dead. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco embarrassed the Kennedys, Robert Kennedy was especially adament on this point. It’s true that no piece of paper has ever been unearthed that shows RFK demanding Castro’s head on a platter. But the record is clear. Bobby Kennedy was a relentless force pushing the CIA to take Castro out.

In 1971, LBJ gave an interview where he said, “I’ll tell you something that will shock you. Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him first.” That conclusion is uncertain, but Castro would have been justified if he was responsible. It would have been a simple act of self-defence.

The CIA didn’t succeed in killing Castro and they gave up in 1965. But they did succeed in killing Castro’s friend, Salvadore Allende. Actually, they backed a coup that led Allende to kill himself (allegedly with a AK-47 given to him by Fidel). What followed was an eighteen year reign of terror by Augusto Pinochet. But that didn’t bother the United States.

By mid 1975, Pinochet set about making economic reforms variously called “neoliberal” or sometimes “free market” by its supporters. He declared that he wanted “to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of proprietors.” To formulate his economic policy, Pinochet relied on the so-called Chicago Boys, who were economists trained at the University of Chicago and heavily influenced by the ideas of Milton Friedman.

The government launched an era of deregulation of business and privatization. To accomplish his objectives, the Chicago Boys privatized the pension system, state industries, and banks, and lowered taxes on income. Supporters of these policies (most notably Milton Friedman himself) have dubbed them “The Miracle of Chile”, due to the country’s sustained economic growth since the late 1980s.

Observing this history, the Washington Post’s editor Fred Hiatt says:

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet’s coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

How is the comparison unfair? First, it is has been sixteen years since Pinochet left power. Castro is still alive. Shouldn’t we wait sixteen years after the communist regime in Cuba collapses before we make comparisons of their respective economic legacies? Second, Salvadore Allende was the elected and legitimate leader of Chile. Castro never allowed elections. Third, if we want to make ecomomic growth a higher priority than human rights, then Hitler was a great leader and wildly better than most communist leaders (elected or not).

It’s hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America.

Fred Hiatt declares that Pinochet was preferable to Castro. That might be debatable, but it isn’t the relevant question. The question is whether Allende was preferable to Pinochet, and on that point the Chileans are nearly united that he was preferable. They are not reading the quarterly reports of ITT and various other multinational corporations. They are thinking about their human and voting rights.

There is no telling how things might have been different if Eisenhower had agreed to meet with Castro and help him build a vibrant economy in Cuba. We’ll probably never know if efforts to kill Castro led to the death of JFK. But we do know that our country’s leaders did not distinguish between legitimate leaders like Allende and dictators like Castro. If they nationalized their resources, they were on our hit list.

Maybe Fred Hiatt should think about that a little more and think about economic growth a little less.