Andres Oppenheimer:

Now that Mexico is officially describing Cuba’s newly retired President Fidel Castro as an ”outstanding figure,” the Brazilian president calls him a ”mythical” leader and the world media are doing verbal pirouettes to avoid calling him a dictator, it’s a good time to take a dispassionate look at Castro’s record.

One wonders, were Mexico and Brazil engaging in subtle word games? After all, Hitler was “outstanding” in the sense that he stood out.

And mythical? Well, yes, gullible saps like Jimmy Carter, Danny Glover and Oliver Stone have bought the romantic myth of the progressive commandante.

Will he be remembered as a well-meaning strongman who raised health and education standards? Or will he go down in history as a selfish tyrant who clung to power for half a century and left his country poorer than ever?

A joke I heard on the streets of Havana in the late 1980s said that the Cuban revolution’s three biggest achievements were health, education and national sovereignty, and its three biggest failures were breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Maybe so. But the Castro government’s list of shortcomings has grown substantially since.

For fairness’ sake, let’s not dwell on reports that the Cuban government considers unfair, such as Forbes magazine’s estimate that Fidel Castro has a $900 million fortune, or the New Jersey-based Cuban Archive ”Truth and Memory” report, which says it has documented 4,073 Castro regime executions and 3,001 ”extra-judicial” killings since 1959.

And let’s set aside for a moment the undisputable fact that Castro has been — by any dictionary’s definition — a dictator, and that nearly 20 percent of the island’s population has left the country since he took power.

If we just look at the Cuban government’s favorite ranking, the 2008 United Nations Human Development Index, which ranks countries around the world with special emphasis on their health and education standards, Cuba ranks sixth in Latin America, behind Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica and the Bahamas.

You’d have to be blind to not recognize the disaster of present day Cuba. Havana looks like it hasn’t had a coat of paint since Batista. Of course, it’s tough to paint walls that are crumbling and when you make $12 a month.

Compare the fate of Cubans who stayed in the island versus those who fled to Miami. In Miami, the “minority” Cubans are not an underclass, but prosperous.

Consider it an experiment in economics: put one group under the thumb of a dictator (the control group). Let another bloom under a nation of laws and economic freedom.

The difference is obvious to everyone but leftist academics and other assorted fools.