DW, you can’t just measure the Hitler comparison on a time scale. He did not engage in mass murder on the scale for which he became famous until he conquered territories where he had victims of that scale, accomplices and the fog of war as a cover. But I will agree with this: Castro did not have genocide in mind, though many of his allies (to whom he frequently sent troops and other support). Then again, Stalin probably did not either; yet by the expedient of classifying his victims by social or economic class, as opposed to ethnicity (strictly speaking), he does not escape the comparison.

I think Castro’s government killed something like 15,000 people. Evil, of course, and an order of magnitude more than, say, Pinochet, but also three orders of magnitude less than Hitler. Castro has also had almost 50 years to do his evil; Hitler had only a dozen years and killed 1,000 times as many. Not every mass murderer is Hitler, or even tries to be Hitler.