Today only a single dictatorship remains in the Western Hemisphere: Cuba.

Thanks to communism, Cuba -- once one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries -- is now one of its poorest. Cuban society is ruthlessly regimented by a police state modeled on those of Stalin and Mao. Much of the Cuban population has been forced to flee in successive expulsions since the 1960s.

The response proposed by American liberals? The United States should be nicer to Fidel Castro. Today almost all liberal politicians, pundits and journalists, joined by many in the American business community, claim that ending U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba will promote political freedom and ultimately democracy in Castro's bankrupt police state.

Curiously, the American left made the opposite claim in the 1980s, when it backed the economic sanctions that played a role in ending apartheid in South Africa. And few liberals show interest in easing sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Will ending sanctions bring democracy to Cuba? Many European and Latin American nations have been trading for years with Cuba without weakening Castro's control, which, like any tyranny, bases its power on controlling the police and the military, not the economy.

Why, then, would trade with the United States bring Castro down? Trade with China has not weakened the grip on power of the Chinese communist party. Indeed, foreign trade and investment may strengthen the power of dictatorships like Castro's and China's, by easing the economic pain that communist elites have inflicted on their captive subjects. In any event, new infusions of cash are likely to end up in the bank accounts of well-connected Cuban officials.

The illogic and inconsistency of the American left can be seen in the equally disturbing double standard in the contrast between liberal perceptions of the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic and Castro.

Like Milosevic, Castro is a hard-line communist skilled at manipulating nationalist sentiments. Just as Milosevic expelled ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, so Castro has expelled tens of thousands of his enemies in successive waves from Cuba. At least Milosevic's atrocities were limited to the Yugoslavian civil war, while Castro sent Cuban mercenaries to promote Soviet imperial aims in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, while intervening in civil wars in Central America to spread communist totalitarianism.

Yet none of the liberal hawks who loudly urged the United States to wage war in Kosovo on behalf of its Albanian minority has proposed military action to free the Cuban majority.

What about judicial action against Castro? The Western left applauded the attempt by Spain to try Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity. But don't wait for American liberals or leftists to propose putting Castro on trial for the imprisonment, torture and execution of political dissidents, homosexuals, and even colleagues like Maj. Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, a potential political rival whom Castro put in front of a firing squad in 1989.

Psychologists may be better able than political scientists to explain why many American liberals idealize foreign dictatorships with institutions or values that they find horrifying in milder forms in the United States. For some reason, many American leftists who loathe the military are not troubled by the fact that Castro appears in public only in a military uniform. American liberals somehow manage to support gay rights in the United States while ignoring Castro's vicious campaigns against homosexuality, which he has defined as a "bourgeois perversion." American liberals fret about the FBI and Internet censorship, while calling for the United States to befriend a regime where culture and religion are rigidly controlled by the secret police.

American liberals opposed to the death penalty often discover charisma in this Cuban caudillo who has frequently resorted to the firing squad to eliminate his opponents. Liberals who mock the "family values" and law-and-order rhetoric of the right, suddenly discovered the importance of family values and law and order when applauding Janet Reno's seizure and deportation of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba (where he is now being programmed like other Cuban children to revere Castro and hate the United States).

As we saw during the Elian incident, liberals who would be offended by stereotypes about Mexicans or Haitians feel free to smear Cuban-Americans as a group. Last but not least, many liberals who want to stamp out sexism and smoking in their own country find themselves titillated by a macho despot whose characteristic prop is a phallic cigar.

Can anyone seriously doubt that, if Castro were a right-wing military dictator rather than a self-described socialist, American liberals would be demanding internationally supervised free elections in Cuba, calling for tighter sanctions to bring down the regime, and perhaps even demanding an international invasion to free the Cuban people?

Unfortunately, from the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia in 1917 until the present, all too many liberals and leftists in the United States and Europe have been willing to excuse murderous dictators like Castro who have used the magic word "socialism" to describe their despotic rule. Even now, some gullible liberals still excuse Castro's vicious autocracy by falling for the regime's propaganda about universal literacy and free health care. (As was the case in the Soviet Union and East Germany, the glowing official reports about Cuban schools and hospitals will almost certainly turn out to be lies).

Few on the American left anymore defend Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, who between them starved or executed almost a hundred million of their own people in the 20th century. But their murderous disciple Fidel Castro can still inspire a flutter in the hearts of many American liberals who are willing to withdraw their objections to tyranny when the tyrant claims to be on the left.